Killer Instinct: The Popular Science of Human Nature in Twentieth-Century America 9780674269651

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KILLER INSTINCT

killer instinct THE P O P U­L A R S C I E N C E

O F ­H U M A N N A T U R E I N T W E N T I E T H -­­ C E N T U R Y A M E R­I­C A

Nadine Weidman

Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts & London, ­England 2021

Copyright © 2021 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printing Cover texture: phongphans59222 / Getty Images Cover design: Lisa Roberts 9780674269668 (EPUB) 9780674269651 (PDF) The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Weidman, Nadine M., 1966–­author. Title: Killer instinct : the popu­lar science of ­human nature in twentieth-­century Amer­i­ca / Nadine Weidman. Description: Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts : Harvard University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021010914 | ISBN 9780674983472 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Science in popu­lar culture—­United States—­History—20th ­century. | Nature and nurture—­United States—­History—20th ­century. | Aggressiveness. | Sociobiology—­United States—­History—20th ­century. | ­Human be­hav­ior. Classification: LCC Q172.5.P65 W45 2021 | DDC 306.4 / 5—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2021010914

 To the memory of my beloved husband Joseph Andrew Ferrari, Jr. September 25, 1965–­December 15, 2020

d

and to our ­children Leora and Andrew this book is lovingly dedicated

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Beast Within

1

How Ethology Became Popu­lar

17

2

The Alchemy of Aggression

48

3

Weapons Created Man

75

4

The Biology of Love

106

5

The Aggression Debate

142

6

Sociobiology and Pop Ethology:



Contextualizing E. O. Wilson

7

Genes and Gender:



The Sociobiology Debate

223

Conclusion

On the Shores of Lake Turkana

260

1

186

Notes

269

Acknowl­edgments

341

Illustration Credits

345

Index

347

vii

INTRODUCTION

The Beast Within An unprejudiced observer from another planet, looking upon man as he is ­today, in his hand the atom bomb, the product of his intelligence, in his heart the aggression drive inherited from his anthropoid ancestors, which this same intelligence cannot control, would not prophesy long life for the species. —­Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression

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nside ­every ­human being, beneath a thin veneer of civilization, dwells a beast. If we want to understand ourselves, we must understand that beast. Millions of years ago, as our hominid ancestors evolved into fully ­human physical form, our minds and be­hav­ior evolved as well. But rather than becoming infinitely flexible, potentially adaptable to any culture or circumstance, a tabula rasa or blank slate, ­human nature took on a fixed form. A suite of psychological mechanisms and behavioral tendencies became just as characteristic of our species as our upright stature and expansive braincase. And just as our physical form resembles ­those of our closest animal relations, we must look to animal be­hav­ior to understand our own. This is the message of the popu­lar sciences of h ­ uman nature, a genre that over the past several de­cades has become a familiar and ubiquitous part of American culture. From sociobiology in the 1970s and 1980s to evolutionary psy­chol­ogy since the 1990s, this genre has purported to explain why h ­ umans are the way they are by referring to the hard core of ­human nature, genet­ically encoded and largely unchangeable.1 Socio­ biology emphasizes the ge­ne­tic basis of social be­hav­iors shared among animals and ­humans, while evolutionary psy­chol­ogy speaks of m ­ ental or emotional traits or propensities. But both sciences lean on the claim that 1

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­ uman nature, as it evolved in response to the rigors of the ancient envih ronment, continues to shape our be­hav­ior in the pre­sent. And both sciences stress ­human commonality rather than intergroup or interindividual differences. Peel back the layers of cultural, national, or ethnic variation, and the original, common ­human nature stands revealed. Far from kindly and gentle, the beast within has dark urges.2 “Are ­human beings innately aggressive?” asked the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson in 1978. “The answer . . . ​is yes.”3 More than thirty years ­later, the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker concurred: “Most of us—­ including you, dear reader—­are wired for vio­lence, even if, in all likelihood, we ­will never have an occasion to use it.” 4 Popu­lar works of evolutionary psy­chol­ogy since the 1990s have routinely told us that h ­ umans, especially males, might very well be “hardwired” for war—­a legacy of our ancestral past still alive within men at pre­sent. Be­hav­iors that our ancestors employed that helped them have lots of offspring, and to ensure that ­those offspring survived and thrived, continue to shape our conduct. If some present-­day men commit rape, and some present-­day ­women seek older, richer men as mates, this must be the reason why. If the forceful, assertive males among our primitive ancestors ­were the successful competitors in the strug­gle for existence, we must have inherited their traits—­ just witness the “alpha males” who strut among us t­ oday. As the ancient pecking order went, so goes modern-­day office politics. Our “us versus them” mentality—­once adaptive in the tribal past—­underlies a per­sis­tent ­human hatred and fear of outsiders and strangers, of anyone who d ­ oesn’t look like “us.”5 As the public has eagerly devoured the books that have made such claims, they have been seized on and amplified by influential voices, journalists and college presidents, policymakers and billionaire philanthropists.6 This book explores how, over the last half of the twentieth ­century, the popu­lar science of h ­ uman nature was constructed. How did its proponents package their claims for public consumption, so that they grabbed the imagination and seemed believable and persuasive? How did lay audiences receive and appropriate t­ hose claims? How w ­ ere debates about ­human nature conducted and closed, to the extent that they w ­ ere? In short: How did the creators of this genre make their knowledge? In illuminating this pro­cess, my aim is to help us become more savvy readers, more skeptical about the claims that popu­lar works in this genre continue to make to the pre­sent day. I find many of their claims deeply problematic, reifying and justifying our worst tendencies—­selfishness, competi2

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tion, xenophobia, aggression—­and playing on pernicious ste­reo­types. But I do not intend simply to criticize them: that has already been done thoroughly elsewhere.7 Instead, I want to understand how such claims achieve the status of “knowledge” in the first place. To answer t­ hese questions, I look not simply at what t­ hese authors claimed, but at how they claimed it, and how ­those claims ­were received. The popu­lar interpreters of the sciences of h ­ uman nature, then as now, actively strategized to make their claims credible and to win adherents. My analy­sis brings ­those strategies into view and shows how they worked so that we might become aware of the power they have exerted, and continue to exert, over us.8 Though thriving at pre­sent, this genre is not a recent invention: it got its start in the 1960s. Before sociobiology and evolutionary psy­chol­ogy, ­there was ethology—­a science of animal be­hav­ior that held implications and lessons for the ­human condition, and that was just as popu­lar in its day as its successors. Before Wilson and Pinker, t­ here ­were Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey, principal purveyors of ethology and its popu­lar variants to the American reading public. In order to understand how the popu­lar science of ­human nature achieved and has maintained its visibility—­how the beast within has come to prevail—we must understand how popu­lar ethology came to prominence and how the debate over its claims unfolded. Like sociobiology and evolutionary psy­chol­ogy, popu­lar ethology also sought to excavate humanity’s inner beast. Lorenz and Ardrey argued that h ­ uman beings possessed a “killer instinct”—an inborn urge for aggression, an urge inherited from prehuman ancestry and shared with much of the animal world.9 The aggression instinct was supposedly pre­ sent no ­matter what one’s environment or upbringing, could be neither eliminated nor bottled up forever, and would ultimately have to find expression. Rather than relationships between predator and prey or hunter and quarry, intraspecies aggression—­aggression that ­humans aimed at each other—­was Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s principal focus. But humanity’s fatal flaw was also, potentially, its greatest strength. If ­human beings could learn to channel and redirect their aggression, as other animals did, then aggression would actually become a positive and constructive force.10 Lorenz, an Austrian ornithologist, was cofounder of the science of ethology, the study of animal be­hav­ior in the wild.11 Renowned for his work on the concept of imprinting, in which a baby bird follows the first parent figure it sees during a critical period a­ fter birth, Lorenz enjoyed a 3

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storied scientific ­career that culminated in his receipt of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He supported the claim for innate aggression with his studies of bird be­hav­ior. Greylag geese—­his favorite scientific subjects—­often sparred with each other, but their fights rarely ended in killing. Instead they ­were able to divert their aggressive urge, to discharge it against substitute objects or in harmless directions. Crucially, Lorenz observed, when aggression was properly redirected, it served to strengthen social bonds among geese. With their aggression directed ­toward substitute objects—­other outsider geese—­the original fighters forgot their differences and came together in what Lorenz was sure was a display of friendship and affection. Aggression, strikingly, had been converted into its very opposite, love. He had no doubt that the animal example contained a vital message for ­humans. Nothing could be more frightening, Lorenz believed, than the image of man as an irascible ape, in his heart the instinct for aggression inherited from his animal ancestors, in his hand the most power­ful weapon ever devised. But humanity could avert disaster by taking a lesson from the beasts: before the aggression urge burst out uncontrolled, h ­ umans must learn to channel its power, as animals did, to direct it productively, to transform it into something positive. The original German title of Lorenz’s 1966 book On Aggression put the point clearly: aggression was only a “so-­called evil.”12 Robert Ardrey lacked Lorenz’s scientific credentials: he was a Broadway playwright and Hollywood scriptwriter, without formal scientific training, who turned to writing popu­lar science books as a second ­career. But he became as convinced as Lorenz of aggression’s positive value. Fossils uncovered in South Africa in the 1950s, Ardrey learned, indicated that the ancient ancestors of ­humans—­the Australopithecines, who lived on the African veldt two million years before the pre­sent—­had not only been hunters and carnivores but had killed each other with crude weapons fashioned out of animal bones. The act of wielding weapons had caused ­these proto-­men to stand upright and use their hands for something other than locomotion; manual dexterity in turn helped to develop and enlarge the brain, turning an apelike brain into a ­human one. Our prehuman ancestors crossed the threshold to full humanity b ­ ecause they had killed with weapons. Ardrey’s books African Genesis (1961) and Ter­ ritorial Imperative (1966) argued that aggression was the very t­ hing that had made man “man.” Like Lorenz, Ardrey argued that the key to the ­human ­future was not to tamp down or try to eradicate the aggression 4

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instinct—an impossibility anyway, since it had been bred into ­humans over eons of evolution—­but to acknowledge and accommodate it. The claim for a killer instinct was never restricted to the pages of scientific journals or intended only for scientific audiences. It became a popu­lar sensation. Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s books ­were best sellers and—in the popu­lar press at least—­rapturously reviewed. A growing roster of popu­lar authors soon joined the cause. I refer to this group as the “pop ethologists,” ­whether they w ­ ere scientists or laymen, b ­ ecause they all intended their writings to reach primarily the broad reading public, not just scientists.13 In 1967, Desmond Morris, an Oxford-­trained ethologist and host of ­children’s tele­vi­sion shows on animal be­hav­ior, published The Naked Ape, depicting ­human beings as animals. In 1968, Anthony Storr, a psychiatrist with a high profile in the British media, came out with ­Human Aggression, endorsing Lorenz’s claim for a h ­ uman aggression instinct. Ardrey’s conception of a weapon-­wielding proto-­man even inspired one of the most famous scenes in American film history: the opening “Dawn of Man” sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 science fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey.14 What accounts for the popu­lar acclaim that the killer instinct received in 1960s Amer­ic­ a? One answer is that the pop ethologists’ ideas about animal and h ­ uman nature caught on ­because they ­were true: audiences rushed to embrace their brand of biology, realizing it was just what was missing from the social and behavioral sciences. This is the answer that the pop ethologists themselves and their followers would ­favor. The obvious prob­lem with it is that p ­ eople do not believe claims b ­ ecause they are true; they believe claims ­because they are persuaded that they are true.15 We must ask instead why ­people in the mid-1960s found the killer instinct thesis persuasive, and why they wanted so badly to believe it was true. “­Because it was true” is no answer at all. Another explanation for pop ethology’s prominence is that it fit perfectly with the po­liti­cal tenor of its times. Appearing during what many considered to be the most violent de­cade in American history—­punctuated by po­liti­cal assassinations and urban riots and overshadowed by the ever-­ present threat of the atomic bomb—­a theory positing “innate aggression” would have certainly struck a chord. The ascent of Lorenz and Ardrey was without doubt contingent on cultural and historical ­factors, but this explanation is crucially incomplete. It makes the pop ethologists themselves into passive beneficiaries of historical circumstance, borne along by the stream of events u ­ ntil conditions w ­ ere right for their emergence. 5

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The contextual explanation neglects the extent to which the pop ethologists capitalized on the context when and how they did, in order to engineer their own prominence. I treat the popu­lar status of the claim for a killer instinct neither as a foregone conclusion nor as a happy accident, but as an achievement, the result of strategies that its proponents deliberately employed. If we consider Lorenz and Ardrey active agents in their own ascent, we open up a series of questions about the strategies they used to make their claims persuasive; to gain allies and audiences; to pre­sent themselves as trustworthy and credible interpreters of the science of ­human nature; and to discredit opponents. As we w ­ ill see, the pop ethologists used a range of persuasive strategies—­ narrative, po­ liti­ cal, rhetorical—to stake their claims and bring them to a broad readership. In their writings they honed and perfected t­ hese strategies and ultimately bequeathed them to their successors in sociobiology and evolutionary psy­chol­ogy. The burden of this book is to show how ­those strategies worked, how they played out in debates over ­human nature, and what legacy they have left us. Making knowledge about h ­ uman nature for nonspecialist audiences is a dif­fer­ent sort of pro­cess from knowledge-­making in less contentious and less public branches of science. In the privacy of the lab, as historians of science have shown, controversies end when one set of truth-­claims solidifies into fact, while alternatives dissolve into myth or pseudoscience. Once established, the facts are cleansed of any indications of context: the circumstances of their creation, the marks of authorship, the subjectivity of their creators, and the very existence of the rivals that once challenged them are all erased from the final product.16 In popu­lar knowledge-­ making about h ­ uman nature, by contrast, debates never reach definitive closure. Although certain views may dominate and alternatives go under­ ground, ­these rivals are never completely quashed but remain waiting in the wings ready to pose a new challenge when circumstances change. Moreover, scientific evidence alone is never enough to s­ ettle t­ hese debates. Instead, by virtue of the very fact that theories of ­human nature seek to encompass “the h ­ uman,” authors making knowledge in this realm must regularly go beyond their evidence to rely on readers’ intuition, to appeal to common or shared experience or values or ideologies, to evoke a shock of recognition in their audiences. Subjective f­ actors, which scientists normally work to exclude from the knowledge-­making pro­cess, play a key role. Proponents use force of personality to bolster their credibility and openly display the charismatic authorship and contexts of 6

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creation of their ideas. Their carefully crafted public images are not incidental to their arguments but constitutive of them, helping to give their claims the appearance of truth. It might seem that such subjective and controversial issues as ­human nature can never properly be considered the domain of real science. Popu­lar works on this topic are merely entertainment—­nothing more. That is clearly not the case, however, given the apparent seriousness with which many readers and reviewers treated the pop ethologists’ books, and the works of popu­lar sociobiology and evolutionary psy­chol­ogy since then. A type of knowledge-­making is definitely ­going on ­here. It might not be the type to which historians of science have traditionally directed their attention, but it is far from inconsequential. In this book I consider popu­lar science not as a watered down or simplified version of what happens in “real” science, but as a genre that operates by its own logic and agenda and that is worth understanding in its own right.17

The Making of a Popu­lar Phenomenon Lorenz and Ardrey w ­ ere heirs to a long philosophical and scientific tradition that placed aggression and vio­lence at the heart of animate nature, including ­human nature. Thomas Hobbes envisioned the state of nature as a “war of all against all” that only a social contract could subdue.18 Charles Darwin also ­imagined “savages” as engaging in “never-­ceasing wars,” but theorized that competition for survival was the motor of the evolutionary pro­cess.19 The victorious tribes would be t­ hose whose members w ­ ere most sympathetic and faithful to each other, Darwin claimed, and thus prosocial emotions would emerge out of belligerence. Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s staunch defender, was so disturbed by the image of “nature, red in tooth and claw” (in Tennyson’s phrase) that he argued that civilized society must act as a refuge from pitiless strug­gle.20 William James deplored war, but he believed it served such a useful function in giving men purpose and channeling their energies that if it w ­ ere ever eliminated a “moral equivalent” for it would have to be found.21 Sigmund Freud was not nearly as hopeful. Writing in the summer of 1929, on the eve of the Nazis’ rise to power in Eu­rope, Freud insisted that a drive t­ oward destruction, dissolution, and death dwelled in the depths of the ­human psyche. “Homo ho­ mini lupus”—­man is a wolf to man—­“a savage beast to whom consideration ­toward his own kind is something alien.” Recalling atrocities from the Crusades to the G ­ reat War, Freud asked, “Who, in the face of all his 7

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experience of life and of history, ­will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”22 Throughout this long tradition ran a per­sis­tent tension, on which the pop ethologists capitalized, between aggression as a pure and unmitigated evil and as necessary to ­human and social pro­gress. In the de­cades following Freud’s pronouncement, social and behavioral scientists tried to render the claim for an aggression instinct in more palatable or at least more experimentally testable form. The American psychiatrist Karl Menninger optimistically advised sublimating aggression into work and play, replacing aggression with love, and thus “effectively denaturing” destructive energy.23 The Yale social scientists John Dollard, Neal Miller, and their colleagues combined psychoanalytic with behaviorist theories that connected stimulus with response to argue that aggression was a drive linked to the strength of prior frustrating events. In a formulation that became remarkably influential, Dollard and Miller hypothesized that aggression was always a consequence of frustration—­a framework they applied to explain such diverse manifestations of aggression as “sibling jealousy and lynching . . . ​street fights and the reading of detective stories, wife-­beating and war.”24 By the 1960s, aggression was a thriving topic of research in social psy­chol­ogy, criminology, and be­hav­ior ge­ne­tics.25 Lorenz and Ardrey did not add anything strikingly new to this ongoing conversation; rather, they combined some of t­ hese already familiar ele­ments in a novel way. As committed Darwinians, they held that ­humans had descended from a common ancestor with nonhuman primates, but they emphasized that ­people ­were basically still beasts at heart and that ­people must take a lesson from animals about how to control their aggression instinct. ­Human society should not be walled off from nature—as Huxley had argued—­but should model itself on nature. Like Freud, Lorenz and Ardrey accepted the notion that the impulse ­toward aggression was innate but denied that it could be a force only for death and destruction. Their animal evidence showed, they believed, that aggression could be discharged so as to strengthen social bonds—­sublimated, to use the psychoanalytic term—­and even converted into love. Lorenz and Ardrey took from Dollard and Miller the overarching definition of “aggression”—­using it to encompass a range of be­hav­iors from killing to self-­assertion—­but rejected its dependence on frustration. For the pop ethologists, the aggression impulse welled up from inward sources regardless of triggers from the external environment and could not be expunged merely by reducing or eliminating frustration. 8

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What was ­really new about the Lorenz and Ardrey books was the im­mense public presence they gave to the idea of a beast within. Love it or loathe it, in the 1960s the killer instinct was on every­one’s lips.26 Their science displayed several key features that should be understood as persuasive strategies, strategies that t­ hese authors deployed to capture and hold public attention. First, ­there w ­ ere the narrative strategies. Lorenz and Ardrey w ­ ere gifted storytellers whose words made animal emotions and be­hav­iors come vividly alive for readers and whose descriptions made readers feel, perhaps with a shock, just how h ­ uman ­those animals ­were. Both authors also inserted themselves into their own books as characters. ­Whether it was Lorenz swimming among tropical fish in the Florida Keys or communing with the geese who had the run of his ­house, or Ardrey holding a fossil skull and gaining sudden insight into ­human nature, the pop ethologists w ­ ere never distant or detached from their subjects—or from their readers—­but ­were deeply and lovingly involved. They did not efface their authorship but openly displayed it. Their own involvement, their own presence in their books, their insistence on their own humanity, worked to draw readers in. Second, t­ here ­were the po­liti­cal strategies. Lorenz and Ardrey presented a demo­cratic vision of science deliberately calculated to appeal to lay readers. The sciences of ­human nature, in this view, ­were not mainly the precinct of a credentialed and specialized elite but should also, and especially, be open and accessible to regular p ­ eople—to the masses. Lorenz argued that laypeople should not only learn from and apply the lessons of animal be­hav­ior to themselves but should actually practice the science of ethology. Amateurs, he was convinced, made better and more perspicuous observers than professionals. Ardrey actually was an amateur, a fact that he never sought to hide but proclaimed proudly in all his books. With this demo­cratic politics of knowledge—­the overture to readers as near equals—­the pop ethologists gave their science a built-in popu­lar appeal.27 Lorenz and Ardrey invested their science with a more direct po­ liti­cal meaning as well. In their view, the concept of instinct, central to the science of ethology, provided a defense of h ­ uman freedom and liberty. If ­humans possessed a hard biological core of instinctive be­hav­iors, most especially an instinct for aggression, then ­there w ­ ere definite limits to the extent to which ­people could be s­ haped, conditioned, and controlled. During the Cold War, many Americans lived in terror of the Soviet threat to engineer a new “communist man”—­one who lived not for himself and 9

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his ­family but for the state—by controlling environmental conditions. Pop ethology spoke directly to this fear and sought to assuage it: the instinctual core would always foil such attempts at behavioral engineering, and the individual would always prevail in the face of totalitarian authority.28 Readers and reviewers of Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s books recognized and responded to ­these persuasive strategies, and together the pop ethologists and their audiences worked to make their science of h ­ uman nature into the popu­lar phenomenon that it became. The third, and perhaps most effective, of the pop ethologists’ strategies was the way in which they characterized—­and caricatured—­their opponents.

The Aggression Debate and Its Legacy The killer instinct was not the only claim about ­human nature circulating in the 1960s. At the very same time, and in response to some of the same cultural conditions, a rival conception r­ ose up to challenge the advocates of aggression. This alternate view held that ­human beings w ­ ere innately endowed with an urge in quite the opposite direction: ­toward cooperation. The main proponent of this claim, and chief self-­appointed public critic of Lorenz and Ardrey, was the American anthropologist Ashley Montagu. Between t­ hese two visions of h ­ uman nature and their proponents ­there arose a fierce, protracted, and ultimately unresolved clash. By the time the aggressionists (as Montagu derisively dubbed them) burst on the scene with their popu­lar books, he was already a well-­known public intellectual. Trained as an anthropologist, Montagu became an out­spoken critic of scientific racism, arguing in the 1940s that the concept of “race” was a toxic social myth that lacked any biological validity. In the 1950s, he advanced the idea of ­women’s “natu­ral superiority,” not only in physical endowment but also psychologically, especially in their inherent ability to provide love and nurture. In magazine columns and TV talk shows, Montagu entertained audiences with his opinions on an im­mense range of topics. But if t­ here was one theme that underlay all his output, it was that h ­ uman beings w ­ ere, by nature, cooperative, altruistic, and loving.29 The drive ­toward cooperation, according to Montagu, was evident both in h ­ uman nature and throughout the natu­ral world. From Peter Kropotkin, the Rus­sian geographer, Montagu a­ dopted the theory that mutual aid among animals, not competition, was the main driving force of 10

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evolution. From the ecologist W. C. Allee, Montagu learned of the positive effects of animal aggregations: animals that gathered and lived in groups had higher survival rates than loners. From object-­relations psychoanalysis and humanistic psy­chol­ogy, Montagu borrowed the claim that ­humans ­were biologically endowed with needs to give and receive love—­needs that, if thwarted, would result in damaged ­people.30 He developed t­ hese ideas in the 1950s while working alongside Pitirim Sorokin, the sociologist who established a research center at Harvard to study saints, altruists, and other selflessly good p ­ eople.31 Combining t­ hese ideas and approaches with his own background in physical and cultural anthropology, Montagu fashioned the claim for a natu­ral drive t­ oward cooperation into a worthy counterpart to the killer instinct. If anyone was well positioned, b ­ ecause of his convictions and his high public profile, to take on the pop ethologists’ claims and try to rebut them, it was Montagu. When Ardrey attacked Montagu in 1966 in the opening pages of The Territorial Imperative, the ­battle was joined. Montagu responded by collecting all the negative reviews of Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s books that he could find and publishing them in edited volumes meant to reach lay readers and destroy the pop ethologists’ credibility. A vituperative exchange of books and articles followed, and for ten years, from 1966 to 1976, a debate raged over the nature of ­human nature. For both sides a g­ reat deal was at stake. Lorenz, Ardrey, and their fellow aggressionists argued that acknowledging and channeling the aggression instinct was the key to averting nuclear Armageddon and achieving world peace. Montagu countered that the belief in a “killer instinct” could become a dangerous self-­fulfilling prophecy: believe you are a killer, and you might just start to act like one. Humanity must instead follow nature’s cooperative dictates. Despite their opposed views of h ­ uman nature, the two sides actually shared much in common, at least at the start of the debate. They agreed that ­human nature was biologically based, that its tendencies—­ whether ­toward aggression or ­toward cooperation and love—­were inborn and “natu­ral,” and that the same tendencies ­were evident in animals as in ­humans. Their views w ­ ere equally “essentialist,” claiming that be­ hav­ior was directly determined by innate features of biology—by physiology or by genes. In their rival essentialisms, both sides held that giving full play to ­human instincts, drives, and emotions—­rather than relying solely on ­human rationality—­would help save humanity from disaster. They even used some of the same persuasive strategies. Both sides w ­ ere 11

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dedicated to popu­lar science as a practice and as an ideal. Montagu was an exile from and critic of academia who, like Ardrey, made his living by writing for the lay public. The antagonists also shared a liberal po­liti­cal agenda born out of their Cold War context. For Montagu as for the aggressionists, the idea of a biologically based h ­ uman nature was ­really a brief for h ­ uman freedom, a defense against Soviet-­style authoritarianism.32 Both sides used this po­liti­cal strategy as a key means of building their popu­lar appeal. The aggressionists, however, never acknowledged the existence of Montagu’s rival essentialism, let alone any of their other shared strategies. Instead, the pop ethologists consistently portrayed him as an extreme environmentalist, who denied biological influence altogether and believed that external ­factors alone—­experience, upbringing, culture—­ shaped be­hav­ior.33 The caricaturing of Montagu was the first step in a pro­cess of polarization. Montagu and his allies retaliated by portraying their opponents as extremists in the other direction—as hard-­line biological and ge­ne­tic determinists who left no room whatsoever for learning or impact of the environment on be­hav­ior. By the late 1960s each side had also acquired a crude po­liti­cal overlay: Montagu’s position became synonymous with the left wing—at its most extreme, with communism—­ while the aggressionists appeared to be right-­wing apologists for the status quo.34 That ­these caricatures failed to represent the positions accurately did not seem to m ­ atter. Protests against them, from e­ ither side, availed ­little, and over time the caricatures proved power­ful. The two sides actually came to fit their exaggerated images. This was especially the case for Montagu, who, for the duration of the debate, s­ topped speaking of “drives” t­ oward cooperation, concerned lest his notion of inborn drives get confused with Lorenzian instincts. “Man is man ­because he has no instincts,” Montagu declared in 1968 and again in 1973, meaning only to refute the aggressionists’ concept of instinct and not the idea of inborn biological drives altogether.35 But this was a nuance that got lost in the fray. His antagonists—­along with the reviewers of their books—­seized on Montagu’s statement and used it to feed their caricature. What started out, then, as a ­battle between rival, but equally biologically based, conceptions of ­human nature became transformed into a clash of extremes: biology on the one hand, represented by the aggressionists, versus environment on the other, represented by Montagu. As the pop ethologists moved to assert a mono­poly over ­human nature, the co12

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operationist tradition, Montagu’s rival essentialism, got pushed to the margins and obscured. The only alternative to their own view, Lorenz and Ardrey maintained, was to attribute all ­human be­hav­ior to the influence of the environment, a stance they regarded as implausible and unscientific. The opposition hardened into an intransigent face-­off between two mutually exclusive positions: nature versus nurture. Of all the persuasive strategies that the pop ethologists deployed, the caricaturing of their opponents as extreme environmentalists may well have been the most significant, for it long outlasted the aggression debate itself. An ancient dichotomy, given its modern form in the late nineteenth ­century, was repurposed as a polemical tool.36 The nature versus nurture framing was a strategy eagerly appropriated by the successors to pop ethology as they formulated their own sciences of ­human nature for popu­lar consumption. As ­these successor sciences also became subject to debate, the polarization of nature versus nurture kept a firm grip on the discourse.37 When the Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson published Sociobi­ ology: The New Synthesis in 1975, he envisioned his science as making a direct intervention into the aggression debate, attempting to rise above its nature versus nurture dichotomy and propose a new approach to the study of animal and h ­ uman be­hav­ior.38 Sociobiology examined the ge­ne­tic basis of social be­hav­ior in animals from insects to primates, interpreting be­hav­iors like communication, reproduction and parenting, aggression and altruism, as means by which individuals enlarged the number of their offspring—in Wilson’s terms, to increase the frequency of their genes in the next generation. He rejected the Lorenzian concept of instinct as vague, argued that his focus on the ge­ne­tic level was more precise, and claimed to place the ge­ne­tics of be­hav­ior in the context of environment. Wilson also aimed to create a more neutral, detached brand of popu­lar science, less openly po­liti­cal and less value-­laden than pop ethology. He presented himself as a dif­fer­ent and more responsible type of pop­u­lar­izer than Lorenz and Ardrey, more a professional scientist and less of a storyteller.39 Yet despite the pains that he took to set himself and his science apart from the pop ethologists, the debate that immediately erupted upon the publication of Sociobiology proved to be just as public and just as divisive as the aggression debate. Sociobiology’s critics—­a group of Marxist and left-­wing scientists calling themselves the Sociobiology Study Group—­saw through Wilson’s defenses and accused him of propounding biological 13

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determinism, that be­hav­ior was in the genes and therefore unchangeable. Sociobiology, this supposedly new science, was simply an apology for the racist, sexist, classist status quo—in fact, it was nothing more than pop ethology in disguise and should be exposed as such.40 As he came u ­ nder attack, Wilson’s attitude t­ oward pop ethology underwent a marked shift. Over the course of his sociobiological writings, he drew closer to the pop ethologists’ views on h ­ uman nature, and he sought out their alliance, both privately and in public.41 Most strikingly, he ­adopted their key rhetorical strategy, dismissing sociobiology’s critics as “radical environmentalists” and “behaviorists” whose po­liti­cal ideology rendered them incapable of admitting that be­hav­ior had any biological basis at all—­the same strategy that Lorenz and Ardrey had deployed against Montagu.42 As a result of ­these polemics, the sociobiology debate took on almost exactly the same oppositional form as the aggression debate: a clash between extremes, nature versus nurture. The familiar pattern reasserted itself, with the same po­liti­cal overlays—­right-­wing conservatism versus communism—­and the same inability to acknowledge common ground. The past had proven difficult to escape as the old debate came roaring back to life. By the end of the 1970s, an or­ga­nized feminist presence—­for the first time making itself felt in debates about ­human nature—­pointed to a way out of the sterile dichotomy. Energized by the second wave feminist movement, scientists like the biologist Ruth Hubbard and the comparative psychologist Ethel Tobach took aim squarely at the sexism of the h ­ uman nature discourse, ­whether aggressionist, cooperationist, or sociobiological.43 All such essentialist claims—­positing direct connections between ge­ne­tic endowment and specific, complex be­hav­iors—­must be rejected both as scientifically fallacious and as unjust. By focusing their critique more centrally on sexism, and then making the parallel to racism, the feminists showed exactly what was wrong with all essentialisms in a more effective way than the male critics, who typically focused on the racism of sociobiology, a charge that the sociobiologists found all too easy to rebut.44 The feminist critique held the potential to disrupt the nature versus nurture pattern of the debate. As they avoided essentialism, the feminists also avoided the “environmentalist” horn of the dilemma by clarifying the roles of genes and physiology in shaping—­not determining—­be­hav­ior. Hubbard took an anti-­positivist stance on science, arguing that all scientific claims about ­human be­hav­ior w ­ ere contingent on cultural context, none reflected the unblemished truth about nature, and all should be 14

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viewed with skepticism.45 The feminists could not be easily classed into ­either the “nature” or the “nurture” camps, and they w ­ ere at pains to reject both. Had they been accorded a more central place by the Sociobiology Study Group, the debate might have looked dif­fer­ent. However, the male critics of sociobiology—­including Montagu—­marginalized the feminists and thus ­limited the impact of their challenge. With the polarized form left largely untouched, debates over evolutionary psy­chol­ogy in ­later de­cades reprised the nature versus nurture dichotomy. In 2002, when the psychologist Steven Pinker presented a popularization of the evolutionary logic under­lying h ­ uman be­hav­ior, he ­adopted a time-­honored strategy. Pinker derided his opponents as extreme environmentalists, in “biodenial,” suffering from “biophobia,” upholding a view of ­human nature as a “blank slate”—­a caricature that went straight back to Lorenz and Ardrey. The goal of evolutionary psy­chol­ogy, in Pinker’s view, was to defeat the stranglehold that the blank slate had supposedly exerted on the social sciences for much of the twentieth ­century. His strawman for this “standard social science model” was none other than Ashley Montagu.46 But pitting “nature” against “nurture” is not the only pos­si­ble way to talk about ­human be­hav­ior—it is a strategic maneuver that over the course of the past five de­cades has been used to obscure and delegitimize the alternatives to popu­lar ethology, sociobiology, and evolutionary psy­ chol­ogy and their conceptions of the beast within. The primatologist Frans de Waal has lamented that for centuries the West has been depicting “our competitive side as somehow more au­then­tic than our social one.” 47 If the aggressionist view has prevailed, it is in no small mea­sure a result of the strategic ways its proponents have caricatured their opposition. “Nature versus nurture” is a polemical framing, not an accurate reflection of the rich diversity of positions on h ­ uman nature that once flourished, from the cooperationist tradition to the feminist approaches. Lumping ­these alternatives together as “nurture,” as the opposite of biology, and thereby dismissing them, does them a serious disser­vice. The aim of this book is to look past ­those polemics, to get beyond the caricatures that impoverish our discussion, and to understand how and why such caricatures gained a foothold in the first place. I begin with the midcentury rival visions of ­human nature, which I show ­were equally biologically based but other­wise opposed. I then analyze the interactions between their expositors over ten years, from 1966 to 1976, a clash that changed both sides, in the course of which their common framework of 15

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assumptions shattered and a nature versus nurture opposition took its place. Out of this clash, and in reaction to it, Wilson formulated his science of sociobiology. Fi­nally, I turn to the sociobiology debate, 1975–1980, in order to show that it took on the same oppositional form as its pre­de­ ces­sor. B ­ ecause individuals—­their qualities and charms, quirks and foibles—­were central to the popu­lar sciences of h ­ uman nature, I take a biographical approach in the following chapters, focusing each on one or two major players in the debates over pop ethology and sociobiology. I show how their charismatic personalities intersected with their claims to credibility and s­ haped the debates over their ideas. In reconstructing t­ hese midcentury debates about h ­ uman nature, I do not suggest that we directly adopt any of their advocates’ perspectives. Their priorities are not ours. Each claim that I discuss ­here was a product of its own time and place, embedded in its own historical context, answering the needs of its own moment. Instead—by reanimating a forgotten world and the denizens who inhabited it—­I show how the complexities of that world came to be forgotten, or rather, deliberately suppressed. Nature versus nurture was not—­and is not—an inevitable opposition. How it came to seem so is the story I tell in ­these pages.

16

CHAPTER ONE

How Ethology Became Popu­lar Animals are emotional ­people of extremely poor intelligence. —­Konrad Lorenz, “Companions as F­ actors in the Bird’s Environment”

O

n the verandah of Konrad Lorenz’s Altenberg home, the big round ­table was laid for tea, and seated ­there w ­ ere Lorenz’s ­mother, his four aunts, and two of their el­derly lady-­friends. At each place setting stood a plate of homegrown strawberries at the peak of ripeness and, at the center of the ­table, a large, shallow bowl of powdered sugar. Just as each lady was about to dip her berries into the sugar, an uninvited guest joined the impending feast: Lorenz’s yellow-­crested cockatoo Koka, a tame bird he had purchased at a pet store, released from its cage and now allowed to fly freely around Lorenz Hall and its grounds. Koka was virtually a member of the ­family, accustomed to paying court to Lorenz’s ­mother and sitting on the verandah ­table while she knitted. On this par­ tic­ul­ ar occasion, however, the unexpected obstacles in the bird’s way and the crowd of unfamiliar ­faces startled Koka out of his usual landing routine. Lorenz’s own words describe best what happened next. Koka “considered the situation, pulled himself up abruptly in mid­air, hovering over the t­ able like a he­li­cop­ter, then turning on his own axis, opened the throttle again and in the next second had dis­appeared. So had all the icing sugar from the shallow bowl, out of which the propeller wind had wafted ­every grain. And around the ­table sat seven powdered ladies, seven rococo ladies,” their ­faces white as snow and their eyes squeezed tight shut. “Beautiful!” This is vintage Konrad Lorenz at his storytelling best, in King Solo­ mon’s Ring, the 1952 book that made ethology known worldwide and Lorenz a ­house­hold name.1 The book described Lorenz’s life with the animals he kept at home and was filled with stories, often funny, sometimes 17

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touching, always memorable: the jewel fish faced with the dilemma of rescuing his errant offspring or devouring a tasty earthworm; the voracious litter of ­water shrews that Lorenz tried to keep sated; the jackdaw who fell in love with the Lorenzes’ ­house­maid. Riding the wave of the book’s popularity, Lorenz made American lecture tours in the 1950s, his image appearing in widely read newspapers and magazines. With his trademark goatee and thick shock of hair, and usually surrounded by flocks of imprinted geese or ducklings, Lorenz cut a charismatic figure in the media. ­Here was a veritable King Solomon, but with impeccable scientific credentials, and no need for that biblical hero’s magic ring to talk with animals. How did Lorenz’s science achieve this visibility: What made ethology “pop”? T ­ here was nothing inevitable or automatic about the ascent to popularity of a science of animal be­hav­ior. Lorenz had spent the 1930s and 1940s developing the practical and theoretical foundations of the science alongside his Dutch colleague Niko Tinbergen. In the postwar period, to make some money, Lorenz started writing popu­lar books: Er redete mit dem Vieh, den Vögeln, und den Fischen (He talked with the beasts, the birds, and the fish, 1949; translated into En­glish in 1952 as King Solo­ mon’s Ring) and its sequel, Man Meets Dog (1949, with En­glish translation in 1954).2 But Lorenz was never a traditional pop­ul­ar­izer, an expert diffusing his knowledge to a receptive and passive public. Rather, his writings inverted the hierarchy implicit in popularization. Lorenz sought to pre­sent ethology as popu­lar science, literally, as a science by and for the ­people. Capitalizing on certain aspects of the practice of ethology, Lorenz constructed it as a science in which laypeople could participate and ­were welcome. In all his writings, including King Solomon’s Ring, Lorenz made it clear that ethology was a science best carried out at home. He called his practice “animal keeping,” in which wild animals, mainly birds of many dif­fer­ent species, w ­ ere given the run of his ­house and allowed to come and go as they pleased. At Lorenz Hall, the f­amily estate in Altenberg, Austria, uncaged animals lived alongside the ­people, and Lorenz’s popu­lar books made the domestic setting familiar to his wide readership. Jackdaws (the highly social, silvery-­eyed members of the crow ­family that Lorenz called the g­ reat love of his life) nested in the attic, flew off at dawn, sometimes returning to join the f­amily for luncheon and sometimes staying away. Greylag geese, his favorite scientific subjects, swam in his ponds and came and went through open win­dows. “Though one must be prepared for the damage and annoyance which is the price one has to pay 18

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for such house-­mates, one obtains a mentally healthy subject for one’s observations and experiments. This is the reason why the keeping of higher animals in a state of unrestricted freedom has always been my specialty.”3 However trying the experience might be, living with animals permitted an unparalleled insight into their be­hav­ior.4 Along with the domestic setting, Lorenz’s science took a narrative form. In both scientific papers and popu­lar writings, storytelling was his preferred mode of conveying scientific knowledge. He simply told what his animals did (or so he claimed), and thus presented himself as an objective observer, inductively building his theories from the ground up. His animals ­were often named, individual characters in his stories. Sometimes he even reused the very same stories in scientific articles as in popu­lar books, and this too served to break down the distinction between professional and lay audiences. Fi­nally, Lorenz’s science was remarkably open to nonprofessionals, not just as audiences but even as prac­ti­tion­ers. Since his ethology took place at home, nonscientists, particularly his ­family members, ­were always pre­sent in it. But Lorenz also cultivated relationships with ­people outside the acad­emy, from the amateur ornithologists who acted as his interlocutors to the admirers who took on his doctrines and developed them in new directions. Moreover, Lorenz gave nonprofessionals a central and honored role in ethology. Amateurs, he stressed, actually made the best observers, since they watched animals out of love and joy and had no ulterior professional motives to cloud that vision.5 The professionals, Lorenz declared, ­ought to emulate them. The story of Koka at the tea t­ able was thus more than just a charming anecdote. It was a win­dow into the methods of Lorenzian ethology: a science done at home, fit to storytelling form, to which amateurs ­were witnesses and in which they w ­ ere often participants as well. T ­ hese ­were the very features that Lorenz used to vault ethology to public notice in the postwar period. Its popularity was not inevitable but a result of deliberate and active effort on Lorenz’s part to invest the science with popu­lar appeal. By breaking down barriers between lay and professional and bringing the ­people in, Lorenz made ethology popu­lar in ­every sense of the word. Out of his practice of domestic science, Lorenz constructed a theory of instinctual be­hav­ior that he maintained consistently over the course of his long and po­liti­cally fraught c­ areer.6 But ethology was never supposed to be restricted only to animals; Lorenz always intended to apply its precepts to ­human be­hav­ior as well. Both in King Solomon’s Ring and, 19

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more fully, in the 1960s, Lorenz deployed his practice and accompanying theory to create a popu­lar science of ­human nature and what he saw as its defining instinct: aggression.7 In this effort, all the practices, concepts, and attitudes he had spent de­cades developing for the study of animal be­hav­ior returned with renewed force and significance. We cannot understand the stance Lorenz took on aggression, however, ­unless we understand the science of which it was the culmination. So we must begin where he did: at his boyhood home.

Lorenz’s Life with Animals Konrad Lorenz was born in 1903 and grew up a child of privilege, tracking wild animals and keeping them as pets at his parents’ estate in Altenberg, a small village near Vienna. His ­father, Adolf Lorenz, a wealthy orthopedic surgeon, and his m ­ other, Emma Lecher, indulged their son in his boyhood passion. Lorenz Hall was set among gardens, woods, and fields, close to the Danube, an ideal spot for watching wildlife. Konrad Lorenz attended the Schottengymnasium in Vienna and, in 1922, at his f­ather’s behest, Columbia University in New York City for premedical studies. Before the first term was over, the younger Lorenz had returned to Austria in order to be near his childhood sweetheart, Margarethe Gebhardt. According to his ­father’s wishes, however, he continued in medical school at the University of Vienna. In 1927, he married Gebhardt, who was also a medical student.8 Though Lorenz received his MD in 1928, he never had any intention of becoming a practicing physician. At the university he had come ­under the influence of the comparative anatomist Ferdinand Hochstetter and had already published a paper on his observations of hand-­reared, free-­flying jackdaws. Lorenz enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Vienna’s Zoological Institute, where he also studied psy­chol­ogy with Karl Bühler, who introduced him to the works of the psychologists William McDougall, Edward  C. Tolman, and John  B. Watson. By 1930, Lorenz had established a correspondence with Oskar Heinroth, the assistant director of the Berlin Zoo and an authority on bird be­hav­ior. Heinroth and his wife Magdalena developed the concept of instinct, including the notions of imprinting, animal rituals, and species-­specific drive activities, that Lorenz ­adopted as parts of his own theorizing.9 Lorenz earned his doctorate in zoology in 1933, but could not find a university appointment, a situation that lasted for the next seven years. 20

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He eked out enough money from his salary as assistant in Hochstetter’s Anatomical Institute to buy food for his birds; his position as lecturer in Bühler’s Institute of Psy­chol­ogy at the University of Vienna was unpaid. He and his wife supported themselves mainly by her job as physician in a Vienna obstetrical hospital.10 But his international reputation was growing. In 1931 he published a paper on the ethology of jackdaws; in 1932 on methods of identifying instinctive be­hav­ior patterns; and in 1935 his paper “Companions as ­Factors in the Bird’s Environment” appeared and was hailed as a major contribution.11 In addition to regular correspondence with the American ornithologists Margaret Morse Nice and Wallace Craig, the British ethologist Julian Huxley, and the German physiologist Erich von Holst, Lorenz had also begun collaborative experiments with the Dutch ethologist Niko Tinbergen on greylag goose be­hav­ior. In the spring of 1937, Tinbergen came to Altenberg to work with Lorenz for several months, a period of time that both men l­ ater remembered as among the happiest of their lives.12 For Lorenz, it was a productive period of intense observation and fertile theorizing.

Animal Keeping as a Research Method Lorenz’s practice of living in the com­pany of wild animals was not simply a source of charming anecdotes calculated to entertain lay readers. It was a scientific method as well. Lorenz did not look at birds from a blind, as many other ornithologists did, observing their be­hav­ior in wild nature. Rather, he “kept” animals—­lived with them, befriended them, accustomed them to his presence, maintained them in healthful conditions so that they would breed—­and all the while observed them. “To live with t­ hese birds, watching them day by day,” was the key method of his science.13 His jackdaws lived in the attic aviary; his greylag geese had full run of the ­house; his starlings perched on his shoulder and ate out of his hand. But they also had the freedom to fly outside whenever and as far as they wished; sometimes they returned “home” and sometimes they did not. Though tame, the animals never became domesticated pets but lived outdoors, among fellow members of their species.14 At the same time, animal keeping was never a pure field practice. The home-­based setting also offered the ethologist opportunities to intervene, to alter the conditions and do experiments. Animals could be placed in unusual situations, isolated, or deprived of relationships with fellow members of their species, and their resultant be­hav­iors assessed. 21

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In the wild, Lorenz believed, animal be­hav­ior operated so fluidly that it became impossible to tell which be­hav­iors ­were instinctual and which ­were learned. In the lab, on the other hand, be­hav­ior became wholly artificial and lost its natu­ral bearings altogether—­the problematic direction taken, Lorenz felt, by American behaviorist psy­chol­ogy. Home offered a ­middle ground, a space intermediate between the wilderness and the laboratory, a place where the scientist could combine observation and experiment.15 By controlling the conditions, to some extent at least, and performing experiments, Lorenz realized that be­hav­ior was composed of small-­scale ele­ments—­sequences of movements in response to environmental stimuli—­ele­ments that had to be teased apart, identified, and analyzed. Whereas the observer in the blind could see such sequences only fully enacted, in orderly and unbroken fashion, the animal-­keeping method enabled the disintegration of be­hav­ior into its components. What appeared to be a seamless action revealed itself to be a chain. Such an analy­sis of be­hav­ior was exactly what Lorenz and Tinbergen achieved in their experiments on the egg-­rolling be­hav­ior of the greylag goose. By moving an egg a distance away from the nest, and then changing the conditions—­substituting an enormous or brightly colored egg for the real one, or one with odd protrusions—­the experimenters could discern which of the goose’s movements ­were instinctual, aimed at moving the egg back into the nest, and which w ­ ere dependent on the goose’s experience of the size and shape of the egg.16 In the unnatural conditions of his home, ­under the controlled circumstances of an experiment, Lorenz refocused the study of be­hav­ior on the links that made up the chain: the stimuli that elicited certain actions, when and how ­those actions ­were performed, and what it took for them to “go off.” When he described carry­ing a wet, limp, black bathing suit ­after a swim in the Danube, and being attacked by a troop of jackdaws who mistook the suit for a dead conspecific, he was not just telling an animal story. He was also making an impor­tant scientific point: identifying what characteristics of a stimulus w ­ ere capable of bringing out a certain 17 set of movements. “Miscarry­ing of be­hav­ior patterns is a key source of our knowledge about them. When they miscarry, fail to fulfill their normal adaptive function, are released by erroneous stimuli, discharge at an inadequate object, or explode spontaneously in vacuo, then we can see them as particulate and instinctive ele­ments of be­hav­ior,” Lorenz argued. “It is the 22

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miscarry­ing of be­hav­ior patterns in the absence of normal environmental stimulation which makes the keeping of animals in captivity an essential source of knowledge.”18 The animal in such seminatural conditions could be deprived of the normal stimuli and what­ever be­hav­iors appeared anyway, especially ­those that appeared purposeless or maladaptive, such as jackdaws attacking a bathing suit, ­were prob­ably the instinctual ones. Without the disintegrating effect of the research method, t­hese behavioral ele­ments would never be discerned.

Instinct: The Central Concept of Ethology The animal-­keeping method led Lorenz to formulate a theory of be­hav­ior centered on the concept of instinct, a concept he developed in his papers of the 1930s but reused and elaborated in all his ­later work. Rather than using the singular term, Lorenz preferred the designation “instinctive be­ hav­ior patterns,” to emphasize their composite nature. Such patterns formed for him a discrete category of be­hav­ior: the ele­ments that made them up ­were inborn and unmodifiable, grounded in biology and correlated with emotions, and thus separable from both learned or insightful be­hav­ior and from ­simple reflexes. Each animal species possessed its own distinctive repertoire of instinctive be­hav­ior patterns, stable u ­ nder normal conditions, and he recognized and characterized such patterns in a daunting array of bird and fish species.19 The emphasis on patterns also underscored their observability: for Lorenz, instinct was no occult or mysterious “force,” but a type of be­hav­ior clearly vis­ib ­ le to the eye of an expert observer, and ethology, the study of such be­hav­ior, was thus an empirical science. Instinctive be­hav­ior patterns w ­ ere composed of several interlocking parts. The primary relationship was between the releaser, an elicitory stimulus—­usually a visual stimulus (a certain vivid marking or behavioral display), but sometimes an auditory or olfactory stimulus—­and the innate releasing mechanism (IRM), the receptor correlate, the perceptual organ that received the stimulus and allowed a behavioral sequence to emerge in response. The releaser and the IRM fit together, as Lorenz often said, like a key and a lock: only a certain stimulus, or combination of stimuli, would be the right ones to “turn” the IRM and unleash the instinctive be­ hav­ior. The releasing “key” had to be ­simple but also sufficiently improbable so that it would open the right “lock” and disinhibit the proper and expected reaction. Lorenz used dif­fer­ent analogies to illustrate this 23

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i­nterlocking relationship: the cue of an actor calling forth a reply from another; a linguistic expression always followed by a certain answer; the mechanism of a spring tripped to trigger a responding reaction.20 In his 1935 paper “Companions as ­Factors the Bird’s Environment,” Lorenz examined a number of relationships between birds to discover what features of one bird w ­ ere the stimuli responded to by another, and what behavioral sequences ­those stimuli unleashed. A parental companion, for example, elicited certain instinctive responses in its young, and “it is only when one attempts to act as a replacement ­mother for the young birds that one realizes how delicately the be­hav­ior patterns of ­mother and young are mutually adapted,” Lorenz wrote, “how slight a change ­will suffice to disrupt the functional patterns of species-­specific instincts.”21 An infant companion would similarly display just the right releasing stimuli to elicit the proper be­hav­ior from its parent; and similar interlocking companionships existed between sexual partners, sibling partners, and social partners. Relying on a wealth of observations of a large number of bird species—­jackdaws, night herons, greylag geese, ducks, egrets—­Lorenz argued that a precise balance existed between the stimuli emanating from one animal and the social responses elicited in its conspecific. He was especially interested in t­ hese social instincts—­those that helped a f­ amily or brood or group to stay together—­rather than the instincts that helped maintain an individual’s own existence. The releaser, the innate releasing mechanism, and the released be­hav­ior together produced animal society. Once unleashed—­once the spring was tripped, the lock turned, and the door opened—­instinctive be­hav­ior patterns unfolded in automatic and ste­reo­typed sequence. They w ­ ere so stable, Lorenz believed, so identical in all members of a given species, so unmodifiable by learning and experience, and so idiosyncratic, that they could be used, just as organs could, to identify the species and reconstruct its phyloge­ne­tic relationships. An instinct, Lorenz asserted, following Heinroth and Craig, was “a response that was complete from the outset.”22 Sometimes it required a pro­cess of maturation, but once mature, its pattern was fixed. Without this constancy and invariability, instincts could not be used for taxonomic purposes; they would lose their evolutionary significance, and ethology its claim to be making a central contribution to biology. “Fixed action patterns provide characteristics of species just as stable as (or even more stable than) any chosen morphological character,” Lorenz wrote in 1932.23 The parallel between organs and instinctive be­hav­ior patterns was so 24

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exact that Lorenz spoke of such patterns not as something the animal does, but as something the animal has, just as it has feathers, wings, and a beak.24 If the primary relationship in Lorenz’s conception of instincts was between releasing stimulus and innate releasing mechanism, a second interlocking relationship was between the instinctive be­hav­ior patterns themselves and learned or conditioned or even insightful be­hav­ior. Lorenz spoke of ­these two types of be­hav­ior—­the inborn and the individually acquired—as being interlaced or intercalated; the instinctive chain might have some links missing that could be filled in by learned be­hav­ iors. The resulting intercalation could give the false impression of variability in instinct, but the acute observer would never be fooled. T ­ here was never any shading or transition between instinct and learning; instinct never developed into intelligent be­hav­ior over the course of an animal’s life. “Fixed, instinctive components in a behavioral sequence do not become more labile and increasingly modifiable by experience with increasing development of learning ability and intelligence,” Lorenz wrote. Rather, over the course of evolution, instinctive patterns “drop out completely, one by one,” to be replaced by acquired be­hav­ior patterns.25 The integrity of instinct as a category, and its separability from other types of be­hav­ior, ­were the bedrock assumptions of Lorenz’s ethology. For Lorenz, a number of characteristics indicated that a be­hav­ior might be innate. That it was performed completely once matured was a key feature. Instincts w ­ ere performed even by birds raised in isolation and performed similarly by all healthy birds of the same species. Instincts w ­ ere impervious to outside influence: they could burst out even in inappropriate circumstances, or be elicited by “erroneous” stimuli, if the animal’s internal state of arousal was g­ reat enough. Birds did ­things by instinct that they could never accomplish if dependent only on their own intelligence, and they seemed not to be conscious of the ultimate adaptive purpose of the instinctive be­hav­ior. Indeed, an animal performed an instinctive action seemingly for the sheer joy of it; something about the per­for­mance itself, Lorenz noted, seemed to bring about an intense satisfaction. Instincts ­were also marked by their appearance at a “critical period” in the animal’s life, and by their irreversibility. In the instinct of “imprinting,” for example, a gosling or duckling responded to the stimuli displayed by its m ­ other, or m ­ other substitute, attached itself to its m ­ other figure, and followed it, coming to its m ­ other’s call. Imprinting was pos­si­ble during only a short period in the young bird’s life. What­ever “­mother” it attached 25

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1.1  Lorenz’s hydraulic model for the functioning of instinct.

to then would be its ­mother for life; the response, once awakened, could not be changed by experience, or reversed, or forgotten, as Lorenz demonstrated by leading flocks of birds that he had raised and that had imprinted on him. The characteristic features of instinct distinguished it from learning, which could happen at any age, and of which forgetting was a necessary and ever-­present pitfall.26 Lorenz used a hydraulic model to illustrate his concept of instinct (see figure 1.1).27 The model asks us to imagine a large reservoir (R), constantly being filled with liquid from a tap (T). This liquid represents the instinctual energy of the organism, which Lorenz envisioned as an a­ ctual physical fluid, perhaps a hormone, constantly endogenously produced by the animal’s internal organs. (Although he never specified this physiological basis—­the hydraulic model remained hy­po­thet­i­cal—he was convinced it existed.) At the base of the reservoir, Lorenz sketched a cone-­shaped 26

H o w E th o l o g y B ecame P o p u ­lar

valve (V) preventing the outflow of the liquid and, attached to the valve, a spring (S) that controlled the valve’s operation. The valve was the innate releasing mechanism—­the “lock,” the perceptual organ that received and responded to incoming stimuli. The spring represented the inhibitions acting to keep the valve closed, damming up the liquid, so that the IRM would not discharge at just anything. Attached to the spring, Lorenz drew a string acting over a pulley, from which a scale pan (Sp) containing weights was suspended. The weights in the pan w ­ ere the incoming stimuli, the releasers, and when heavy enough they acted to trip the spring and open the valve. When that happened, liquid from the reservoir flowed out through the spout: this outflow was the instinctive be­hav­ior itself. Lorenz proposed mea­sur­ing the strength of the instinctive response by seeing how far out along the scale (G) the jet spouted. The oblong trough (Tr) at the very bottom helped distinguish activities that required only low levels of excitation from ­those that appeared when the outflow force was at its highest. A number of impor­tant consequences followed from the hydromechanical meta­phor. First, Lorenz insisted that the driving force b ­ ehind the instinctive be­hav­ior patterns did not come from an outside source: it was internally produced, or endogenous. Lorenz believed that such energy could be compared to any centrally produced rhythmic activity of an animal’s ner­vous system—­its heartbeat or breathing, or the rhythmic contractions that von Holst observed in the isolated ventral nerve cord of the earthworm.28 From the claim for endogenous production followed the prediction that if the energy level built up enough, ­there could be a spontaneous outburst or outflow of instinctual action. The liquid pressure itself would force open the valve without the need for stimuli to weight down the pan. Lorenz expected that he would see such spontaneous outbursts—­ vacuum activities, he called them, Leerlaufreaktionen—in animals deprived of normal releasing stimuli. In a story he loved to repeat, a hand-­ reared, well-­fed starling that lived with Lorenz in his parents’ apartment in Vienna exhibited that very be­hav­ior. “One day I saw him sitting on the head of a bronze statue . . . ​and behaving most remarkably,” Lorenz reported. “His head and eye movements gave unmistakable signs that he was following moving objects. Fi­nally he flew off the statue and up to the ceiling, snapped at something invisible to me, and returned to his post,” swallowed, shook himself, and settled down quietly.29 Lorenz climbed on a chair to look for evidence of the victims of his bird’s prey-­killing 27

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be­hav­ior. But he never found even the tiniest insect. The bird had acted solely out of internal compulsion. From the model followed the notion that with sufficient accumulation of endogenous energy, even a minor or brief stimulus—­a tiny weight in the scale pan—­could set off a reaction. But once exhausted—­once the reservoir was emptied—­a much greater weight of stimuli would be needed to set off the same reaction again, and it would undoubtedly be much weaker the second time around, performed with much less heart. The model also suggested the concept of “displacement,” a term coined by Tinbergen: if a reaction’s usual pathway was blocked, but the accumulated energy still needed to find some outlet, it would “spark over” into a foreign pathway, and an unexpected motor pattern would result.30 Another key prediction of the model was that, contrary to the claims of the psychologist William McDougall, instinctive be­hav­iors would not always be performed “perfectly.” They could misfire or miscarry, go off in response to an inadequate or erroneous stimulus, if the pressure was ­great enough, or even in the absence of any stimulus at all (as in the vacuum activity). While McDougall confounded the animal’s purpose in performing with the survival value of the instinct, Lorenz separated the animal’s own desire for gratification from the instinct’s adaptive purpose, of which the animal had not the slightest inkling. A starling hunting, killing, and eating imaginary flies was clearly not performing an adaptive be­hav­ior; what it was ­doing was satisfying its internal impulse to carry out ­these be­hav­iors and, Lorenz claimed, gaining an im­mense satisfaction from ­doing so. The per­for­mance of the be­hav­ior itself was what the animal sought. Borrowing Craig’s notion of “appetitive be­hav­ior,” Lorenz argued that animals would deliberately seek out situations that allowed them to fulfill their instinctive be­hav­ior patterns.31 Any dog owner observing his well-­fed pet pounce on and “kill” his master’s slipper could attest to this claim. “The goal which the animal subject strives to attain is not the adaptive purposivity of its ‘instincts’ . . . ​but the satisfying per­for­mance of the instinctive be­hav­ior pattern itself,” Lorenz wrote.32 “It is undeniably the subjective experience effect which makes the instinctive pattern an attractive goal.”33 Subjective experience—­emotion—­actually had an impor­ tant role to play in the achievement of instinctive be­hav­ior patterns. The subjective plea­sure associated with instincts meant that the animal actively wanted to perform them and was not passively or mechanically “driven.” The subjective aspect of the definition marked instinct as a spe28

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cial kind of be­hav­ior, dif­f er­ent from reflexes, which ­were unaccompanied by any feeling of satisfaction. Animals, Heinroth had said, and Lorenz never tired of repeating, ­were “very emotional p ­ eople with very l­ittle intelligence.”34 Emotions and their correlated instincts formed the bond that connected ­humans to animals, and Lorenz always used his own subjective identification with and empathy for his animals to try to gauge what they must be feeling. He freely applied ­human emotional terms to animals—­grief, jealousy, anger, love, sadness, guilt, fear—­and had no doubt that the animals ­were actually feeling t­ hese t­ hings, or experiencing some emotional state much like them. Speaking of animals “falling in love,” or “being jealous,” was not anthropomorphizing ­because, Lorenz claimed, “the ­animal and ­human motor patterns concerned are . . . ​genuine phyloge­ne­tic homologues. . . . ​The emotionally based ­human be­hav­ior patterns concerned depend on neurophysiological pro­cesses that are fundamentally the same.”35 For Lorenz human-­animal emotional parallels w ­ ere hardly a ­coincidence; they w ­ ere rooted in a common evolutionary history. Such ­parallels ­were a consistent feature of Lorenz’s scientific papers of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, as well as his popu­lar writings in the de­cades ­after the war. At the same time, Lorenz cautioned that it was impossible for the ­human observer to fully understand what an animal was feeling. When Lorenz’s greylags enacted be­hav­iors associated with a “nest-­building motivational state” (Nestbaustimmung), how could h ­ umans, who shared no such be­hav­ior pattern, ever understand the satisfaction that it gave the bird? McDougall must have been wrong to limit animal emotions (and instincts) to thirteen—­the number of governing instincts that the psychologist identified in ­humans. If birds experienced a Nestbaustimmung, a Flugstimmung (flight motivation), and the like, they must have many more small-­scale emotions than ­humans do. It was more accurate to understand their “motivational states” as mosaic stones, links in the chain of the animal’s overall behavioral repertoire, rather than as a holistic overarching “maternal instinct,” as McDougall did.36 Lorenz had constantly to defend his animal psy­chol­ogy against charges of “crude anthropomorphizing.”37 The subjectivizing, however, was not tacked on to the theory as an afterthought, or as a coy bid for popu­lar attention; emotion was, rather, an essential aspect that set instinct apart from other types of be­hav­ior and made instinct a discrete category on which the new science of ethology could be founded. 29

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Ethology thus ­adopted the concept of instinct from ­earlier theorists but, in reviving it, sought to place it on what Lorenz believed was much more secure scientific footing. Envisioning an animal’s instinctive repertoire as a system of interlocking, small-­scale ele­ments, he presented a wholly biological view of instincts. Not only ­were they just as stable as organs and therefore just as useful for evolutionary biology, they ­were grounded in physiology, in the working of hormones and the rhythmic pulsing of the central ner­vous system. But ­these instincts, though indelible, stable, and consistent in all normal members of the species, existed in delicate balance with ele­ments of the surrounding environment and could easily be deformed by environmental alteration. In the domestic setting, as in a quasi-­laboratory, Lorenz could control the conditions so as to induce instinctual breakdown. Living with animals and observing them at close range taught him that instincts w ­ ere both biological and fragile.

Lorenz’s Way of Looking at a Blackbird Lorenz’s ethology came not only with its distinctive method (animal keeping) and not only with its central concept (instinct, biologized and therefore newly legitimized). Lorenz also practiced a distinct form of objectivity, a kind of purity in which his declared freedom from any preconceived opinion or idea combined with a direct and detailed witnessing. He presented himself as a transparent and unbiased observer, so completely innocent of any prior hypothesis that when he began his research, he claimed, he had not even known the names of the major theorists of animal be­hav­ior, much less been influenced by their theories.38 He simply saw and recorded what his animals did, down to the most minute flick of the tail feathers, while his friend Alfred Seitz photographed and filmed his subjects so that not a detail would be missed. In his “Companions” paper of 1935, Lorenz wrote, “The observer is demonstrably ­free of any hypothesis,” and his observations “assembled of their own accord over the years” without even an organ­izing princi­ple to distort them.39 The sheer amount and specificity of detail, the compounded observations of dozens of dif­fer­ent bird species, served to establish him as a true witness.40 The hours that Lorenz spent watching wild animals w ­ ere reflected in his storytelling technique. Telling stories—­recording exactly what happened and when—­was a key pre­sen­ta­tion strategy. For Lorenz, storytelling was a type of direct witnessing, his stories usually filled with 30

H o w E th o l o g y B ecame P o p u ­lar

details about the place and date at which they had occurred. He described his 1931 paper on the ethology of the social Corvidae as “just a plain story, pure description, with precious ­little theorizing.” 41 He related that he reared fourteen young jackdaws in 1927, kept them tame by feeding them by hand, put colored rings around their legs to tell them apart, but other­ wise let them fly freely. The paper told of their habits and adventures, explaining at the end what happened to each individual: “When I returned on the 3rd  of June [1930], both Blue-­Yellow and Left-­Green had dis­ appeared.” 42 The details of the story affirmed the observations as au­ then­tic and the observer as trustworthy. Sometimes the same stories that appeared in a scientific paper reappeared ­later, substantially unchanged, in a popu­lar book. For example, Lorenz related in papers from 1931 and 1932 how his jackdaws launched a rattling attack on the wet black bathing suit he was carry­ing; the same anecdote appeared in King Solomon’s Ring. The hand-­reared starling that hunted imaginary insects, first introduced in a 1932 paper, also reappeared in On Aggression. The stories that Lorenz chose to reuse ­were typically ones that illustrated some larger theoretical princi­ple: the black bathing suit showed how general an elicitory stimulus could be, and still be effective, while the starling’s be­hav­ior was the quin­tes­sen­tial vacuum activity. In both cases the observation came first, and the theoretical princi­ple followed, according to Lorenz’s inductive ideal. Theoretical neutrality and absence of presupposition did not mean that Lorenz was detached from his subjects. On the contrary, he was deeply emotionally invested and involved in the lives of his animals. He loved them, loved to watch them, and believed that such love was a prerequisite for accurate scientific observation. Only an observer who watched for the sheer joy of observing, Lorenz said, would have the patience to stare at a flock of geese or ducks or jackdaws for the thousands of hours it took to gain full expertise on their be­hav­ior. Love did not compromise objectivity: it made objectivity pos­si­ble and enhanced it. Against ­those who would accuse him of anthropomorphizing, Lorenz transformed what might have been perceived as a weakness into one of the signal strengths of his science. Lorenz never doubted who made the best observers: not credentialed, professional scientists, but amateurs—­bird-­watchers, zookeepers, and anyone who watched animals ­because they loved to do so. A consistent theme throughout his writings was that amateurs are the real experts. A 1937 article began by asserting that “practical students of animals 31

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(zoo attendants, biologically educated amateurs or field observers)” employed a consistent concept of instinct, which “prominent theoreticians” have not adequately acknowledged.43 The superiority of the lowly zookeeper’s concepts accompanied his faculty of intuition: “In zoological systematics, more than in any other branch of biological research,” Lorenz wrote in 1941, “the success of the investigator is dependent upon a ‘feel’ for the subject ­matter.” This type of “systematic intuition” could not be taught; it could be acquired only through the close observation of many dif­fer­ent characteristics of many dif­fer­ent members of an animal ­species.44 Though watching animals might appear to be a “somewhat childish hobby,” Lorenz admitted, it was the “pronounced playful interest in living animals,” an interest usually displayed by amateurs, that allowed for the “enormous duration of observation that is necessary in order to establish the inductive basis for phyloge­ne­tic comparison in behavioral research. If playful interest and the primary plea­sure in the object did not render observation itself enjoyable, even the most self-­sacrificing, patient observer would never succeed in spending months and years gazing for hours everyday with the most concentrated attention at a duckpond or aquar­ium.” 45 For Lorenz, the ideal animal observers w ­ ere his mentor Oskar Heinroth, the American zoologist Charles Otis Whitman, and Whitman’s student Wallace Craig, with whom Lorenz carried on an extensive correspondence in the late 1930s. Lorenz described Whitman and Heinroth as “happily ignorant of the g­ reat ­battle waged by vitalists and mechanists on the field of animal be­hav­ior, happily f­ ree from even a working hypothesis.” ­Here ­were “two ‘­simple zoologists’ . . . ​just observing the pigeons and ducks that they loved,” the only way, in Lorenz’s view, to amass “a sound, unbiased basis of induction.” 46 For Lorenz, their simplicity, their lack of status and credentialed expertise, went along with their closeness to and love for their animals, and allowed them to observe deeply and without blinders.

The Dangers of Domestication Although Lorenz lived with his geese and jackdaws, though they imprinted on him and he identified them as individuals and often by name, he never considered them to be domesticated. They ­were wild animals that happened for some part of their lives to live in or near Lorenz’s home. The distinction was crucial to Lorenz’s science. Domesticated animals 32

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­ ere by definition abnormal, in his view; the pro­cess of domestication w weakened them, caused their instinctive reactions to become simplified, blunted, sometimes to dis­appear altogether. The behavioral degeneration was reflected in their physical appearance. A barnyard animal made a poor showing next to its wild cousin: the domestic specimen was pot-­ bellied, short-­legged, weak, and ugly, compared to the beauty and nobility of the wild type. Lorenz acknowledged that the loss of instinctive be­hav­ior patterns meant freedom from their automaticity; a creature lacking strong instincts had room to develop its intelligence by learning. But a definite disadvantage accompanied such flexibility. When instinctive be­hav­ior patterns decayed, their “gatekeeping” function was lost: they failed to maintain their role as guardians of the “right” be­hav­ior for the species. In wild geese, for example, courtship and mating w ­ ere ­under instinctual control and ensured the stability of goose social bonds, which Lorenz believed ­were power­ful and enduring. But domesticated geese showed much less selectivity in choice of mates. If goose society had its behavioral norms (as Lorenz believed it did), when instinctive be­hav­ior patterns decayed, the social and ethical functions they served, and their role as protector of t­ hose norms, ­were also lost.47 Even when it came to choosing a pet, Lorenz said he preferred dogs closest to their wild ancestors. Modern dog breeding ruins dogs, he wrote, advising his readers to avoid ­those with too “good” a pedigree.48 For Lorenz the effects of domestication ­were as deleterious as they ­were unmistakable. In the 1935 “Companions” paper, he noted that debilitated, uncharacteristic instincts appeared in domesticated animals, and warned against using such animals in scientific studies of instinct. In the egg-­rolling paper, Lorenz again emphasized that “pure-­blooded” geese made the best subjects, as innate releasing mechanisms lost their characteristic specificity of response in domesticated creatures.49 Lorenz’s emphasis on the normative aspect of instinct served him well in the next phase of his c­ areer. His idyllic early period of animal-­ watching came to an abrupt end in March  1938, when the Anschluss brought Austria u ­ nder the control of the Nazis. Delighted by this turn of events, Lorenz hoped that the annexation would benefit him personally. H ­ ere at last, it seemed to him, was a regime that understood the importance of biology, unlike the anti-­evolutionary sermonizing of the Austrian Catholic government.50 According to Burkhardt, Lorenz “floated ‘in confidence’ the image of himself as someone who could replace a 33

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­ redominantly ‘Jewish’ ­human psy­chol­ogy with a new psy­chol­ogy that p was ‘properly German.’ ”51 Lorenz joined the Nazi party in June of 1938. By 1940, he was appointed to the Kant Professorship of Psy­chol­ogy at the Albertus University of Königsberg in East Prus­sia, which came along with the directorship of an Institute of Comparative Psy­chol­ogy. Adapting his domestication theme to the Nazi context, Lorenz wrote two articles in 1940 making explicit connections between Nazi racial hygiene and his own studies of animal be­hav­ior; the second of t­ hese was published in the official Nazi journal for biology teachers.52 Lorenz quickly became part of the Nazi war machine. In October 1941, just eight months ­after assuming his Königsberg position, he was drafted into the German Army, first as a military psychologist in Poznan, a city in western Poland taken over by the Nazis ­after their invasion of Poland in 1939. In Poznan, as a member of the Nazi Office of Race Policy, Lorenz administered ­mental tests aimed at sorting “mixed Poles and Germans into German-­like p ­ eople that could be rehabilitated and Poles who could not,” and who w ­ ere subsequently sent to concentration camps.53 When such psychological testing was discontinued, he worked as a physician and psychiatrist at the reserve hospital in Poznan.54 Along with ­these practical activities, Lorenz continued to support Nazi ideology through intellectual l­abors. In 1943, he published another article extolling the virtues of race purity, and warning of the disruptive effects of domestication on animals’ instincts.55 In this 1943 article, “Innate Forms of Pos­si­ble Experience,” Lorenz took the argument a step further by equating domestication with civilization and conceiving of the h ­ uman as a sort of domesticated animal. For both domesticated animals and civilized men, he claimed, instincts w ­ ere blunted, and standards of proper be­hav­ior slipped. Sexual instinctive releasing mechanisms, for example, expanded and lost selectivity, criteria loosened for what made an adequate sexual object, and decline in quality of offspring inevitably followed. The eugenic overtones of the argument ­were explicit. Lorenz drove home the argument by juxtaposing two sets of images in which fat, short, stumpy domesticated creatures w ­ ere contrasted with their lean and noble-­looking wild counter­parts. The rule held for ­humans as well, and was reflected in works of art. The short-­limbed, pot-­bellied terra cotta figurines of ancient Greek art ­were objects of fun, laughable and ridicu­lous caricatures, just as the pug-­ nosed bust of Socrates contrasted with the aquiline-­featured Pericles. ­There was no mistaking, Lorenz asserted, which figures we would clas34

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1.2  Lorenz included this cartoon in his 1943 article “Innate Forms of Pos­si­ble

Experience,” (Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 5 [1943]: 235–409, p. 306) to illustrate “The Degeneration [Verhausschweinung] of Civilized Man in Caricature.” The German term may be translated literally as “house-­pig-­ ification.” The cartoon was by the Swedish artist Robert Högfeldt.

sify as ugly and which as heroic and beautiful. That we felt an instinctive revulsion at the one and admiration for the other was no coincidence: our own emotional responses ­were an infallible guide to our inborn be­hav­ior patterns, and ­these registered negatively to what was not “natu­ral,” to any sign of domestication-­induced degeneration or breakdown (figure 1.2). “­Human judgments of the beauty and ugliness of one’s conspecifics are truly inborn schemata in play,” Lorenz averred. “One w ­ ill never find a hero with short legs, a paunch, narrow shoulders or a pug nose [Stupsnase]!”56 His argument moved readily between animal and h ­ uman, nature and art, as well as between instinct and value. What is (or at least what Lorenz deemed “natu­ral” or instinctive) slid easily into what ­ought to be (what Lorenz deemed right, proper, and good). Facts of appearance and be­hav­ior dictated moral preferences. In June of 1944, while working on the Eastern Front, Lorenz was captured by the Rus­sians and transferred to a Rus­sian prisoner of war camp. He remained a prisoner for three and a half years, serving as a doctor to his fellow prisoners and writing a huge manuscript about ethology on scrap paper from cement sacks.57 Upon his release in February 1948, Lorenz made his way back to Altenberg and rejoined his wife 35

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and two c­ hildren. He picked up his life and his science where he had left off and sought to put his Nazi period firmly ­behind him. To supplement his f­ amily’s income, Lorenz turned to popularizing, and both King Solomon’s Ring and its sequel, Man Meets Dog, appeared in German in 1949. Lorenz introduced the public to the science of ethology through vivid descriptions of his life in the com­pany of wild animals. ­After the war Lorenz also gained the professional support he had long sought. In 1949 the Austrian Acad­emy of Sciences took over the support of his research station at his home in Altenberg, renaming it the Institute for Comparative Be­hav­ior Study. In 1950, through the patronage of the wealthy amateur animal enthusiast Baron Gisbert von Romberg, another research station was established for Lorenz and his associates in a c­ astle called Buldern, in Westphalia, south of Münster. This arrangement faltered a­ fter only two years, when the Baron died in 1952. By 1955, however, the German government afforded Lorenz his own Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen, an area southwest of Munich.58 In gaining the government-­funded research station that he had always wanted, Lorenz found a place where he could work and live with his animals—­a place just like home. Lorenz never abandoned the claims about domestication, and the equation of domestication and civilization, that he developed during the war. ­These themes persisted in his writings for the rest of his ­career. In his 1950 “Part and Parcel in Animal and H ­ uman Socie­ties,” he wrote, “In the aesthetic sphere, our emotional value judgment categorizes as repulsive characters which have arisen through typical domestication effects, whilst characters which are threatened by the same effects of domestication are classed as desirable.”59 The paper reproduced the same pictures of Socrates and Pericles and of domesticated and wild animals as had appeared in the 1943 article. Feelings, gut reactions, w ­ ere good and reliable guides, ­whether t­ hese w ­ ere “ethical evaluation feelings” responding to unnatural or immoral be­hav­ior, or aesthetic judgments assessing morphological characters. In his 1954 “Psy­chol­ogy and Phylogeny,” Lorenz again emphasized the disrupted be­hav­ior patterns of domesticated animals. The more finely specialized social instincts dis­appeared, while the baser instincts—­those for eating or mating—­were “hypertrophied” or exaggerated. As the selectivity of responses was lost, the be­hav­iors could be elicited by much simpler substitute stimuli. The wild greylag goose, in Lorenz’s depiction, was monogamous and faithful, while its barnyard cousin would mate with 36

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anything that moved. No longer was falling in love a prelude to copulation; the emotional state was dissociated from the sexual act. And since falling in love was, according to Lorenz, the best driver of natu­ral se­lection—­because it was about choosing the best partner—­the dissociation spelled disaster. Lorenz left no doubt that he was talking about ­humans as well as animals. “Individuals with behavioral deficiencies penetrate ­peoples, states, and cultural circles in just the same way (and for quite similar reasons) as malignant cancer cells penetrate the h ­ uman body. As with cancer cells,” he asserted, “such individuals can eventually destroy the host organ­ization, and thus themselves.” 60 Domestication—­civilization—­ came along with reduced rigidity of be­hav­ior, loss of instinctive patterns, and the subsequent growth of intelligence, ability to learn, to flexibly adapt to experience. The reduction in our specialized instincts means we have become “creatures of curiosity.” But, as in his war­time papers, Lorenz emphasized that this trade-­off had a very definite downside: “The deficiencies to which man owes his specific freedom are closely allied with t­ hose that drive him to destruction.” 61 With l­ ittle alteration, the same claims appeared in Lorenz’s popu­lar writings, King Solomon’s Ring and On Aggression. ­There, however, as we ­will see, the instinctive be­hav­ior pattern threatened by domestication was not eating or copulating, but killing, specifically, killing members of one’s own species. In ­these writings, some of which ­were scientific papers, ­others popu­lar works, some written for Nazi officials, o ­ thers for the American reading public, Lorenz evinced a remarkable chameleon-­like capacity to blend in with the sociopo­liti­cal circumstances in which he found himself.62 In the context of the Third Reich, his ideas about domestication took on Nazi camouflage; ­after the war, he put the argument in the ser­ vice of decrying long-­range weapons of mass destruction. His deliberate and strategic ability to clothe his ideas in an ever-­shifting protective coloration should not, however, conceal the under­lying consistency of his claims and assumptions.

Lorenz and His Critics of the 1950s Lorenz’s growing scientific recognition and public acclaim in the 1950s made him the target of criticism. His critics w ­ ere scientists—­mainly fellow zoologists and comparative psychologists—­and they tended to take an interactionist stance: rather than claiming that instinct did not exist, they 37

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argued instead that instinct was not as cleanly separable from learning as Lorenz claimed. No critic argued against the existence of instincts altogether. Four critiques Lorenz received in the 1950s illustrate the objections to which he was vulnerable. The Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb argued that Lorenz’s attempt to isolate the instinctive from the learned was illegitimate, since be­hav­ior always took place against and necessarily depended on a certain environmental background, without which the be­hav­ior could not occur.63 One could attribute, Hebb said, a degree of variance from the species behavioral norm to e­ ither heredity or environment; one could even specify the amount of influence each f­ actor had on the variance. But such an apportioning of influence always took place with certain ele­ments of the environment held constant, as a steady-­state background and—­Hebb’s crucial point—­this meant that that environment must always exert an influence, too. “In distinguishing hereditary from environmental influence,” Hebb wrote, “I conclude that it is reasonable and intelligible to say that a difference in behaviour from a group norm, or between two individuals, is caused by a difference of heredity, or a difference of environment; but not that the deviant be­hav­ior is caused by heredity or environment alone.” Interaction of the variable ­factors with the environmental background of the steady-­state produced the be­hav­ior: “The be­hav­ior one can actually observe and experiment with is an inextricable tangle of the two influences, and one of them is nothing without the other.” 64 Hebb’s argument questioned Lorenz’s working assumption that an animal’s instinctual be­hav­ior reflected solely that animal’s hereditary endowment. The Cambridge physiologist J. S. Kennedy attacked another of Lorenz’s working assumptions: the notion of an “endogenous, accumulable, consumable form of ner­vous energy,” separable from the mechanism it was supposed to power.65 The assumption was graphically represented in Lorenz’s hydraulic diagram, which pictured the liquid as a substance distinct from the reservoirs it filled and the springs it tripped. But this separation of energy from mechanism—of a “motivating core from a reflex coat in the causation of be­hav­ior”—­was dualistic, even vitalistic, and therefore in Kennedy’s view entirely unjustifiable.66 “Ethological energy, conceived as absolutely distinct from reflex mechanisms which alone have direct external relation, is quite as subjective as the Freudian id,” Kennedy proclaimed. The Lorenzian assumption found­ered on two prob­lems: first, it relied on an outmoded conception of reflexes as rigid, wooden, fixed responses; and second, it portrayed instinct as entirely internally 38

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driven. But no be­hav­ior was completely spontaneous or motivated only endogenously.67 In fact, Kennedy pointed out, physiologists from Sherrington to Pavlov had shown that reflexes—­from the simplest knee-­jerk reactions to the most complex instincts—­were regulated by both internal and external conditions, and even the seemingly most automatic reaction, the contraction of the ­human pupil in response to light, could be conditioned.68 Like Hebb, Kennedy argued that the ele­ments that Lorenz insisted on separating—­heredity from environment, innate from learned, instinctual from reflex, endogenous from conditioned—­must actually be conceived as interacting. Neither Hebb nor Kennedy argued against the existence of instinct, only against its classification as a discrete and in­de­ pen­dent category. If Hebb and Kennedy nipped at Lorenz’s heels, Daniel Lehrman went for the jugular. In a thorough critique appearing in the Quarterly Re­ view of Biology in 1953, Lehrman, a comparative psychologist trained by T. C. Schneirla, made a threefold attack.69 First, Lehrman argued, Lorenz ignored the concept of development, the interaction between the organism and its environment that happened at ­every stage of its growth. Lorenz assumed—­wrongly, in Lehrman’s view—­that instinctive be­hav­ior patterns simply unfolded in teleological fashion, as a preformed kernel matured ­toward its predetermined end. Such a model did not allow for ongoing mutual influence among the organism’s parts, or between organism and environment. Lehrman argued that Lorenz unduly neglected the possibility that such interactions could help direct, step-­by-­step, an organism’s developmental path—­that the ­whole t­hing need not be laid down in advance. Lorenz’s experiments—in which organisms w ­ ere deprived of certain stimuli, but nonetheless performed an instinctive reaction—­did not necessarily prove that the instinct was ready-­made, driven inexorably ­toward completion solely by internal sources of energy. It was also pos­ si­ble, Lehrman pointed out, echoing Hebb, that the reaction could have been produced by interaction of the organism with other aspects of its environment from which it has not been isolated.70 For Lehrman, Lorenz’s theory was rigid, preformationist, and finalistic.71 Second, Lehrman objected to Lorenz’s assumption of a physiological correlate for e­ very ele­ment of be­hav­ior. Single, autonomous centers in the ner­vous system, in Lorenz’s model, supposedly produced the endogenous energy responsible for driving the production of vari­ous instincts. But ­there was no evidence for such physiological correlates; Karl Lashley’s experiments disproving ce­re­bral localization of function in rats had, according 39

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to Lehrman, thrown into grave doubt the claim for autonomous “centers” of function corresponding to certain be­hav­iors. Entirely unfounded was Lorenz’s assumption that “neural events under­lying be­hav­ior patterns much somehow be isomorphic with the be­hav­ior itself.”72 Fi­nally, Lehrman excoriated Lorenz for his ­free analogies between animal and ­human motivation. Lorenz never acknowledged, Lehrman claimed, that h ­ uman motivation was “more complicated” as well as “qualitatively dif­fer­ent in organ­ization and development” from that of lower organisms.73 Such analogies w ­ ere the result of Lorenz’s continual confusion of evolutionary levels. Lorenz’s equation of animal domestication with ­human civilization—­and his claim that both led to degeneration—­was a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem. Perhaps Lorenz was unaware, Lehrman wrote, that some domesticated breeds of dog w ­ ere, far from stumpy-­limbed and pot-­ bellied, actually leaner and fleeter than their wild wolf cousins. Not only did the analogy fail on closer scientific inspection, it was also po­liti­cally suspect. Lorenz’s argument that socie­ties needed to “erect social prohibitions to take the place of the degenerated releaser mechanisms” was a quasi-­scientific formulation of Nazi eugenics, having been “presented by Lorenz in the context of a discussion of the scientific justification for the then-­existing (1940) German l­egal restrictions against marriage between Germans and non-­Germans.”74 Lehrman was scrupulous, however, in not saying the word “Nazi” and in not letting any po­liti­cal criticism overshadow his scientific objections.75 Three years ­later, in 1956, the biologist and socialist J. B. S. Haldane made the po­liti­cal critique of Lorenz in stronger terms. Haldane sympathized with Lorenz’s general theoretical program, arguing that ­human be­hav­ior contained “traces of instinct” and that “the study of animals may tell us a good deal about the h ­ uman unconscious, and thus about irrational ­human be­hav­ior.”76 Both of Haldane’s statements echoed Lorenz’s notion that a deep biological substrate, a “beast within,” connected h ­ umans to animals. Like Lehrman, however, Haldane objected strenuously to Lorenz’s civilization-­domestication analogy. “I believe the statement that man is a domesticated animal to be almost wholly false,” Haldane wrote. “Such politics are based on ‘the value of racial purity’ . . . ​‘the function of the intolerant value-­judgment’ . . . ​and other tenets of the National Sozi­ alistiche Arbeiter Partei.”77 Neither Haldane nor Lehrman would allow Lorenz to forget his murky po­liti­cal past or the appearance of eugenic race politics in what purported to be scientific work. How far such ideas seeped into his science, w ­ hether they could ever be distilled out, or w ­ hether they 40

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stained his entire oeuvre, remained questions for Lorenz and his critics for the rest of his ­career. Lorenz did not respond immediately to t­ hese criticisms, but when he did, his impulse was in no way to retreat from his claims. In 1965 he produced Evolution and Modification of Be­hav­ior, a scientific defense of his theory and practice that aimed to preserve the concept of “the innate” from being discredited.78 His critics claimed, according to Lorenz, that much of the be­hav­ior that he classified as innate was actually learned. In Lehrman’s example, pecking be­hav­ior in the chick developed as a result of certain experiences the chick had in utero, not as a result of preformed instinct. But, Lorenz objected, how could it be that the chick just happened to learn the very action crucial for its survival? Clearly, in Lorenz’s view, the learning mechanism had to be phyloge­ne­tically evolved; that is, that anything the chick experienced had to be mediated by a set of genet­ ically determined and evolved structures, which ensured that what was learned would be an effective aid to survival. Without the support provided by phyloge­ne­tic history and the information it stored in the genome, the investigator was forced to assume a “prestabilized harmony” between organism and environment that taught the organism just the very ­thing it needed to know. “Phyloge­ne­tically adapted structures and their functions,” Lorenz wrote, “are what effect all adaptive modifications. In regard to be­ hav­ior, the innate is not only what is not learned, but what must be in existence before all individual learning in order to make learning pos­si­ble.”79 Assuming that effective, adaptive be­hav­ior could arise in each individual organism’s lifetime essentially “by chance” was anti-­evolutionary, according to Lorenz, and therefore unscientific. Lorenz also defended his use of the deprivation experiment, in which certain stimuli w ­ ere withheld from a young animal and its be­hav­ior patterns assessed. If it performed motor patterns “in complete and recognizable sequence” despite the deprivation, the ethologist would be able to tell “at once and automatically” how much of t­ hose be­hav­iors was innate. If the animal failed to perform, however, this did not necessarily mean that the be­hav­ior was not innate. It could mean simply that the organism was not healthy or had been badly reared. Lorenz warned against using animals “propagated in captivity” for such experiments, b ­ ecause “captivity changes all the hitherto effective selective ­factors in so profound a manner that serious changes must be expected in the genome of the stock ­after only a few generations.”80 Thus despite criticism, Lorenz reiterated his claims about degeneration by domestication. 41

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In the same 1965 book, Lorenz classified his opponents, especially Lehrman and Hebb, as “behaviorists,” a caricature that failed to represent their positions accurately. Behaviorists, in Lorenz’s view, ­were total environmentalists: they supposedly attributed all be­hav­ior to learning, to exposure to the conditions of the animal’s environment, and hardly anything to the animal’s ge­ne­tic endowment. That none of Lorenz’s critics ­were behaviorists, let alone behaviorists of this type, did not seem to ­matter to him. His view did not allow for nuance. In Lorenz’s sketching of the landscape of the ethology debates, a Manichaean dichotomy existed between his own evolutionary, biological approach and that of blank-­slate behaviorism. ­Either you w ­ ere a Lorenzian or you w ­ ere a behaviorist; alternative conceptions of the biological, such as Lehrman’s, became impossible, and dif­fer­ent kinds of commitments to the idea of innate drives ­were effectively rendered invisible. Lorenz responded explic­itly to the po­liti­cal criticism only ­after his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1973.81 By then, the ethologist was embroiled in a debate not simply about his concept of instinct, but about his claim for a h ­ uman aggression instinct and its significance for h ­ uman civilization—­a debate that involved a much more diverse cast of characters on both sides. In this debate he characterized his opponents, including Lehrman, in the same deliberately inaccurate way—as behaviorists. As we ­will see, this strategy, which Lorenz deployed consistently, would have ­im­mense repercussions for the pro­gress and outcome of the aggression debate.

A Kind of Peasant Scientist In his books for lay readers, Lorenz presented himself as a practitioner of a hands-on, home-­based science. As his reputation grew in the postwar period, his portrayal in the media confirmed this impression. He never appeared as the typical white-­coated professional laboratory scientist, but was always depicted living, working, and playing with and among his animals. A newspaper article from 1955, published during his New York City lecture tour, pictured Lorenz at the Bronx Zoo, acting as “­mother” to a flock of newly hatched ducklings. Within half an hour, the article reported, Lorenz, “who speaks fluent goose and duck,” had the nestlings answering to his call, the photo­graph of the bearded scientist reaching out ­toward the young birds reinforcing the image of a scientific King Solomon (or rather, an attentive and loving ­mother) (figure 1.3).82 42

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1.3  Lorenz at the Bronx Zoo in 1955 with a flock of imprinted ducklings

(from “Five Baby Ducks Get ‘­Mother’ with Beard,” New York Herald Tribune, January 23, 1955).

A Life magazine photo essay from the same year showed Lorenz, shirtless, “standing chest-­deep in ­water on his Westphalia preserve,” surrounded by swimming goslings. In another picture he tramped across a field, in work clothes and boots, carry­ing a food bucket and followed by a line of imprinted geese (figure 1.4). Captions stressed that Lorenz lived frugally, d ­ oing all his own chores, and that his science had developed out of his boyhood hobby of animal-­watching.83 The scientist had evidently maintained the clear, unbiased vision of a child in the research work of his adulthood.84 A 1966 Washington Post article, appearing just as On Aggression was published in En­glish, featured a large photo­graph of Lorenz in a pond, his head vis­i­ble just above the ­water, flanked by two snow geese, whose necks and beaks formed a heart-­shaped frame around his face (figure 1.5). A caption said that Lorenz described himself as “a kind of peasant scientist.”85 The collective impression given by ­these popu­lar depictions was of a true animal lover, close physically and emotionally to his subjects, not afraid to get his hands dirty, whose childlike enthusiasm made his work 43

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1.4  A 1965 depiction of Lorenz leading a train of imprinted geese. The

caption reads, in part, “He has described himself as a ‘peasant type of naturalist.’ ” From Niko Tinbergen and the Editors of Life, Animal Be­hav­ior, Life Nature Library, Time-­Life Books (New York: Time Incorporated, 1965).

seem like play and at the same time granted him unparalleled insight and expertise. ­These portrayals w ­ ere of a piece with Lorenz’s attitude t­ oward amateurs. The openness that he expressed ­toward them in his prewar and war­time writings carried over postwar as well. As he had in e­ arlier de­ cades, he continued to describe and praise his own mentors as amateurs. In an article in Scientific American in 1958, Lorenz noted that Charles Otis Whitman had observed the be­hav­ior of pigeons “which he had bred as a hobby since early childhood,” while Oskar Heinroth was “an amateur aviculturist who had spent a lifetime observing his own pet ducks.” “What a queer misnomer is the word ‘amateur’!” Lorenz exclaimed. “How unjust that a term which means a ‘lover’ of a subject should come to connote a superficial dabbler! As a result of their ‘dabbling,’ Whitman and Heinroth acquired an incomparably detailed knowledge of pigeon and duck be­hav­ior.”86 Even in the introduction he wrote in 1970 for a volume of his collected papers, Lorenz affirmed the amateur’s importance for ethology. 44

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1.5  “Loving snow geese bracket the shaggy head of Konrad Z. Lorenz who

has trained them to think of him as their ­mother.” From Niko Tinbergen and the Editors of Life, Animal Be­hav­ior, Life Nature Library, Time-­Life Books (New York: Time Incorporated, 1965). The same photo also appeared in reviews of On Aggression in the Washington Post, July 3, 1966 and in the London Observer, September 18, 1966.

The comparative study of be­hav­ior required an intimate knowledge of the similarities and differences between dif­fer­ent species, and only a devotee could gain such insight. “Such familiarity is not easily achieved,” he wrote. “In fact, it seems necessary to become emotionally involved to the point of ‘falling in love’ with a group in the way that many bird-­lovers and aviculturists and other kinds of ‘amateurs’ do. Without this emotional motivation, no thorough knowledge of the comparable behavioral traits of any group of animals could ever be gained.”87 In Lorenz’s science, love, joy, plea­sure, and emotional involvement ­were essential ingredients, requisite for developing the familiarity and observational basis on which ethology rested and on which it was inductively built. And ­because ­these feelings w ­ ere most clearly pre­sent in amateurs, according to Lorenz, the professionals r­ eally ­ought to be emulating them. In this way he inverted the conventional status hierarchy: love took 45

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pre­ ce­ dence over detachment, practical experience and observation trumped theory, and amateurs became the preeminent experts. The attitude was reflected in Lorenz’s relationships with a­ ctual amateurs. Not only did he describe his own mentors, Heinroth and Whitman, as such. Lorenz also developed several close, collegial relationships with t­ hose who e­ ither did not possess professional credentials or ­were employed in marginal positions, but whose opinions on his work he sought and clearly valued. The American ornithologist Margaret Morse Nice was one of t­ hese amateur experts. An authority on the song sparrow, Nice received a master’s degree in psy­chol­ogy from Clark University, but never held an academic position.88 Yet by introducing Lorenz to Wallace Craig, by helping to acquaint other American comparative psychologists with Lorenz’s work, and by carry­ing on an extensive correspondence with Lorenz, Nice played a key role in Lorenz’s ­career.89 On similar good terms with Lorenz was the American playwright Robert Ardrey, who in midlife developed an amateur’s passionate interest in paleoanthropology and ethology and wrote best-­selling books about them. Lorenz described Ardrey as “a very good ethologist in his own right,” and though Lorenz thought Ardrey sometimes went overboard in some of his popularizations, the professional stressed his agreement with the amateur’s work.90 And the American novelist and social critic Philip Wylie, who venerated Lorenz, defended the scientist’s ideas in a 1968 book called The Magic Animal, and also corresponded extensively with Lorenz.91 Their admiration was evidently mutual, since Lorenz quoted Wylie to defend himself against his critics, asserting that their attacks ­were, “as Philip Wylie has put it,” incited by an instinctive desire to defend their own turf.92 Lorenz prob­ably did not hold ­these amateurs, with the exception of Nice, in the same regard with which he held his fellow ethologists. In fact, he sometimes distinguished himself from them, a strategy we w ­ ill see him using in the 1960s debates over his work, to distance himself from some of its more controversial implications. Despite t­ hese strategic demarcations, however, Lorenz did seek out and value the amateurs’ opinions, and does not seem to have wished to conceal any association with them. They and their work ­were prominently mentioned in his scientific papers as well as in his popu­lar writings. In Lorenz’s pre­sen­ta­tion, ethology was a science open to anyone with the interest and wide-­eyed curiosity of a child, and never reserved only for elite experts or credentialed professionals. Ethology’s popu­lar ap46

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peal was thus no coincidence but woven into its very fabric from its beginnings. Its domestic setting, storytelling form, and cele­bration of amateurs help situate it, especially in the US context, as a kind of vernacular science, a power­ful if submerged current in twentieth-­century American culture.93 But if ethology was a science by and for the ­people, it was a science of the ­people as well. Ethology was not just a science of animal be­hav­ior; Lorenz always intended it to encompass ­human nature. Just as animals ­were portrayed as emotional p ­ eople, p ­ eople w ­ ere revealed to be animals at heart, possessing instinctual repertoires just like other animals and acting according to their dictates. Lorenz had emerged from World War II convinced that aggression was the most central and impor­tant ­human instinct, a subject he first broached in the concluding chapter of King Sol­ omon’s Ring and then more fully in his 1966 On Aggression. ­There, posing as social prophet, Lorenz argued that man must acknowledge and accommodate his instinct for aggression or suffer certain doom. How he sounded this darker theme, while maintaining all the accustomed emphases of ethology, is the subject of chapter 2.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Alchemy of Aggression The rough and spiny shoot of intra-­specific aggression . . . ​bear[s] the blossoms of personal friendship and love. —­Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression

I

n the heart of Central Eu­rope late in the 1950s, the ethologist Konrad Lorenz witnessed a momentous confrontation between two superpowers—­not two nations locked in a Cold War standoff, but two fish. In one of the many aquaria that Lorenz kept at his research station in Seewiesen, a male and female of the Cichlid ­family threatened each other across a brief expanse. Cichlids are among the fiercest of fighting fish, most aggressive against other members of the same species. Brightly colored when glowing with rage, male Cichlids have been known to tear each other to ribbons, leaving nothing but bloodied corpses floating on the ­water’s surface. Lorenz routinely kept male and female in separate aquaria, but now, as an experiment, a male and his prospective mate ­were in the same tank, and the tension was palpable. The female hovered “fearless and truculent, in the m ­ iddle of the territory of her mate, her fins outspread in an attitude of self-­display,” her colors in the shifting light of the aquar­ium hardly distinguishable from the male’s. The infuriated male “assume[d] an attitude of broadside display, discharge[d] some tail beats, then rushe[d] at his mate,” headlong into the attack.1 But Lorenz was surprised by what happened next. Just as he neared her, instead of finishing her off, the male’s attention was suddenly diverted. Another fish in the aquar­ium, another male Cichlid resting over a nearby nest, had attracted his notice. Still in full fighting regalia, and still bursting with rage, the original male darted narrowly past the female and instead launched “a furious attack” on his 48

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territorial neighbor.2 And then, his aggression discharged, he returned to his female and got on with the business of producing the next generation. The observation of ­those fish on that day changed the way Lorenz thought about aggression: from a negative impulse needing simply to be neutralized, to a positive and constructive force. In the last chapter of King Solomon’s Ring, his widely popu­lar postwar book, Lorenz departed from his charming animal stories to summon a chilling image: man, he argued, must be understood as an instinctually aggressive animal, armed to the teeth with deadly weapons that he had no natu­ral ability to control. While other animals had evolved gestures of submission and rituals to deflect aggression directed at them by conspecifics, h ­ umans had no similar inbuilt safety valves. Their aggression would accumulate, just as any other deep-­seated instinct, ­until it overflowed in vio­lence. But the example of the Cichlids showed that if aggression could be caught before it overflowed, diverted from its intended target and discharged in a harmless direction, it could actually serve a positive function. When the male Cichlid’s territorial neighbor bore the brunt of his attack, the bond with his female mate was strengthened. Redirected and channeled, aggression became transformed into its very opposite—­into a force that held families, communities, and socie­ties together. It was a transmutation worthy of the medieval alchemists: as they had dreamed of turning dross into gold, Lorenz witnessed hate turning into love. The Cichlids taught him that aggression was not all about destruction. Rather, aggression was the very t­hing that underlay social bonds and made them pos­si­ble. The insight was at the heart of Lorenz’s next popu­lar book, Das Sogennante Böse (1963), translated into En­glish in 1966 as On Aggression.3 As an inborn instinct, aggression could never be eliminated, but rechanneling aggression away from its traditional targets into harmless or productive outlets would strengthen social and communal connections. The book’s ultimate message was optimistic: vio­lence at all levels, from street fights to war, could be avoided if h ­ uman beings learned to behave like Cichlids. In a Cold War world overshadowed by the threat of the atomic bomb, the stakes of the argument could not have been higher. Lorenz believed he had hit upon a truth about h ­ uman nature that could literally save civilization. From lighthearted storyteller, the ethologist now appeared as social prophet, proclaiming a dire warning and a solution that mankind must heed. But in presenting himself as an authority on h ­ uman nature, Lorenz faced an expertise deficit. It was not immediately obvious that the story 49

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of the Cichlids, or any other animal tale, should have anything whatsoever to do with averting nuclear Armageddon. A case had to be made for the h ­ uman relevance of ethology, and Lorenz, even by virtue of his popu­lar appeal, did not create this perception of relevance single-­handedly. Instead, he sought help from an entirely dif­fer­ent arena: psychoanalysis. In his bid to change the way aggression was understood and handled, and to consolidate ethology’s claim to be a h ­ uman science, Lorenz found a crucial ally in the psychoanalyst Anthony Storr. In the 1960s, Storr, a practicing psychotherapist and public intellectual, ­adopted the Lorenzian view of aggression as constructive in order to solve a prob­lem he faced in his own therapeutic practice. Storr found that his patients needed an outlet for “healthy aggression,” which other­ wise remained bottled up or manifested in psychological symptoms, neurosis, or even psychosis. But no such concept existed in the psychological lit­er­at­ure, which treated aggression e­ ither as a response to frustration, and thus ideally eliminable, or as a death drive, and thus wholly destructive. When Storr encountered Das Sogennante Böse in 1963, he instantly realized that h ­ ere was the very conception of aggression as a positive force for which he had been searching. Storr’s own writings appropriated the Lorenzian definition of aggression as an indelible h ­ uman instinct and Lorenz’s prescription for its safe and constructive discharge. Lorenz in turn used Storr’s backing as proof that his conception of aggression applied as fully to ­humans as to fish. Support from an expert in ­human psy­ chol­ogy meant that ethology could claim to have broken through the animal-­human boundary and to be a science of h ­ uman nature. The alliance between Lorenz and Storr was not as unlikely as it may sound, nor was it unpre­ce­dented. By the time the two men met, the ethologist had already been communing with psychoanalysts for a de­cade. In the 1950s, while his instinct theory was ­under attack from ethologists and comparative psychologists, Lorenz received crucial support from the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, pioneer of attachment theory. As the historian Marga Vicedo has shown, Bowlby claimed that the child’s inborn need for a ­mother figure found a biological analogue in Lorenz’s discovery of imprinting in birds. The convergence convinced Bowlby that the synthesis of ethology and psychoanalysis was at hand. Seizing on Bowlby’s endorsement, Lorenz deployed it to vindicate his own instinct theory, to ­counter his critics, and to bolster his public image as an expert on ­mother love.4

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Lorenz’s alliance with Bowlby made pos­si­ble and prefigured the ethologist’s alliance with Storr. Bowlby helped or­ga­nize the 1963 symposium on aggression where Lorenz and Storr met in person. In seeking out both Bowlby and Storr, Lorenz reached well beyond ethological circles—in fact beyond his profession entirely—to recruit allies from a dif­fer­ent discipline. The psychoanalysts helped fuel Lorenz’s reputation as an authority on h ­ uman nature and h ­ uman society. First for m ­ other love, then for aggression, Lorenz’s reliance on psychoanalysts gave his instinct theory a ­human relevance—­and a visibility—­that he never could have achieved on his own.

The Synthesis of Ethology and Psychoanalysis Like his younger colleague Anthony Storr, John Bowlby was a psychiatrist seeking to chart a path for psychoanalysis in­de­pen­dent of Freud. Bowlby (1907–1990) was a member of the British object-­relations school, a group of psychoanalysts who defined the aim of life not as the gratification of instinctual desires, as the Freudian plea­sure princi­ple held, but rather as the creation of relationships with o ­ thers. Bowlby’s expertise was in mother-­child relationships. Trained in analy­sis by Melanie Klein and convinced by Klein that “certain events of early childhood ­were of critical importance in determining personality development,” Bowlby focused on “the child’s relationship to his ­mother, and the ­mother’s unconscious attitude ­toward the child, based on her own childhood experiences.”5 Bowlby served as a British army psychiatrist during World War II and, in 1946, having taken up child psy­chol­ogy and child guidance, joined the Child Guidance Department at the Tavistock Clinic for outpatient psychotherapy in London.6 In 1950, in the wake of World War II, the World Health Organ­ization (WHO), the international health agency of the United Nations, conscripted Bowlby to study the m ­ ental health of homeless c­ hildren. His 1951 report Maternal Care and M ­ ental Health claimed that maternal deprivation, the rupture of the essential mother-­child bond, did terrible and lasting damage to a child’s personality. The child’s development is “almost always retarded . . . ​physically, intellectually, and socially,” and the deprived ­children did not go on to become successful parents themselves.7 Bowlby’s theory of attachment held that a child would suffer permanent ill effects if separated from his m ­ other for many months. In fact, the effects

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could be permanent if the ­mother did not display appropriate maternal feelings and responses, even when she was pre­sent. But what could account for the permanence? Answering this question led Bowlby to “be interested in Professor Lorenz’s work.” As the psychoanalyst explained, “the phenomenon of imprinting at once struck me as possibly impor­tant to my own work.”8 Bowlby grasped the analogy between the psychoanalytic focus on the mother-­infant dyad and the ethologist’s train of imprinted goslings following a ­mother figure. As the gosling’s early experience of ­mother determined its social relationships for the rest of its life, so the proper development of the child into a normal adult also hinged on his mothering during his own early critical period. Bowlby’s conviction that the mother-­child relationship was “manifestly an example of instinct, in the ethological meaning of the word,” and that it was “also at the center of psychoanalysis” created his perception of a natu­ral fit between the two disciplines.9 By 1953, when Bowlby wrote a popu­lar summary of the WHO report, he was explic­itly appealing to ethological evidence in his arguments about maternal deprivation. Referring to the “deep and long-­lasting effects” of early emotional experiences in birds and dogs, Bowlby believed that such examples showed “that the theories put forward in this book, far from being in themselves improbable, are in strict agreement with what biological science has shown to be true of both bodily and ­mental growth.”10 In addition to his written endorsements, Bowlby participated with Lorenz in a series of discussions on child development, or­ga­nized by the WHO in response to Bowlby’s report, that took place in Geneva and London between 1953 and 1956.11 In his 1958 paper “The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His ­Mother,” Bowlby took a thoroughly Lorenzian view of instinct. By speaking as Lorenz had of “instinctual responses,” Bowlby emphasized that ­these ­were observable patterns of be­hav­ior, and not “abstract” and “hidden” motivating forces like Freud’s death instinct. Like Lorenz, Bowlby argued that ­these instinctual patterns of response, once matured, ­were fixed and peculiar to each species; he considered “attachment be­hav­ior” to be as species-­specific to h ­ umans as the “egg laying activity of the female cuckoo” and the “courtship of the grebes” ­were to their respective species. He borrowed the Lorenzian concept of the releaser, arguing that the infant’s smile acted to stimulate nurturing be­hav­ior on the part of his ­mother just as the mating response of the male stickleback was elicited “by the perception of a shape representing a pregnant female.”12 52

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Fi­nally, like Lorenz, Bowlby i­magined instinctual responses as links in the chain of be­hav­ior, mosaic stones that contribute to the overall pattern. Positing five primary and relatively in­de­pen­dent infantile be­hav­iors (sucking, clinging, following, crying, and smiling), Bowlby theorized that “in the course of the first year of life . . . ​­these component instinctual responses become integrated into attachment be­hav­ior.”13 “They serve the function of binding the child to m ­ other and contribute to the reciprocal dynamic of binding m ­ other to child.” The exclusivity of the bond was paramount: as the pro­cess of imprinting bound one individual to another, so the components of attachment be­hav­ior “in the normal course of development” became, according to Bowlby, “focused on a single m ­ other figure.”14 The alliance between Bowlby and Lorenz benefited both partners. Lorenz’s support gave the unmistakable imprimatur of biological legitimacy to Bowlby’s psychoanalytic claims about the importance of “object-­ relations,” early attachment to a m ­ other figure, and the mother-­child bond. Bowlby used Lorenz’s theory of instinct to clarify the meaning of that concept, put it on scientific footing, and move it away from its Freudian associations.15 For Lorenz, the association with Bowlby both reinforced the impression that ethological concepts applied unproblematically to ­humans and enhanced Lorenz’s credibility as a spokesman on the ­human condition. But ­mother love was not the only animal instinct that Lorenz believed bore significance for h ­ umans. Even as he was appearing in the American popu­lar media as “­mother” to his birds—in the iconic image, leading a train of imprinted goslings—­Lorenz was turning his attention to a dif­fer­ent instinct altogether: aggression. Like ­mother love, Lorenz believed aggression was an indelible instinct, necessary for survival.16 As he presented himself as an authority on ­human motherhood, Lorenz sought to parlay his expertise on aggression in animals into a prescription for ­human vio­lence. And as with imprinting and attachment, Lorenz consolidated his argument about aggression with help from psychoanalysis.

Vicious Doves and Peaceful Wolves Lorenz developed his conception of aggression as an instinct in animals and man over several de­cades. In the manuscript that the ethologist wrote while a prisoner of war in the 1940s, he alluded to the “animal within” as “a danger that should be taken very seriously . . . ​quite simply for the continued 53

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existence of humanity.”17 A ­ fter the war, Lorenz foregrounded the prob­lem of h ­ uman vio­lence in his writings, first in King Solomon’s Ring.18 In contrast to the book’s overall buoyant tone, its last chapter, “Morals and Weapons,” struck a serious, even pessimistic, note. Lorenz invoked a contrast between seemingly harmless, herbivorous animals, like hares, and animals endowed with “natu­ral weaponry”—­long teeth or sharp claws, like wolves. Hares, in all likelihood, could never inflict much damage on each other, and ­were so fleet-­footed that escape from an aggressor was always a live option. A wolf, on the other hand, “that symbol of cruelty and voraciousness,” could easily tear a conspecific to shreds, especially a smaller, weaker one. But, Lorenz contended, wolves would never do so—­because a set of inbuilt social inhibitions, triggered by a submissive gesture, prevented them from taking the fatal bite. Observe two wolves, an older and a younger, in the heat of b ­ attle: the young one, overpowered, “holds away his head, offering unprotected to his ­enemy the bend of his neck, the most vulnerable part of his body.”19 The gesture of submission was the impinging stimulus, the releaser that tripped the instinctive switch in the older wolf. The attack was ­stopped dead in its tracks, the wolf rendered literally incapable of proceeding. Such submissive rituals and responding instinctual inhibitions—­a perfect example of Lorenz’s lock-­and-­key model of instincts—­had evolved in all animals possessed of the ability to do real damage to conspecifics. The fangs and the taboo against using them, according to Lorenz, developed together. Lorenz then turned to the second half of the contrast: animals without such natu­ral weapons. Observe that symbol of peace, the dove. Normally doves, like hares, could escape easily if an aggressor got too close. But put two doves in a cage, and carnage would result. Lacking fangs, horns, or claws—­though equipped with sharp-­enough beaks—­the doves would peck each other to death, ­because they also lacked the inhibitions that prevented such mutual destruction. Lorenz’s own experience supported the claim. “I put a tame, home-­reared male turtle dove and a female ring dove together in a roomy cage,” he tells us. “I left them in their cage and went to Vienna. When I returned the next day a horrible sight met my eyes. The turtle dove lay on the floor of the cage; the top of his head and neck, as also the ­whole length of his back, ­were not only plucked bare of feathers, but so flayed as to form a single wound dripping with blood.”20 (See figure 2.1.) For Lorenz t­ here was no question on which side of the contrast ­humans stood. Possessed of aggressive instincts just like e­ very other 54

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2.1  Lorenz’s playful drawings

from King Solomon’s Ring: (a) ​Man and goose (frontispiece) (b) Lorenz’s cockatoo Koka

hovering over the verandah ­table (p. 48) (c) ​the two doves’ murderous

encounter (p. 184) (d) ​Lorenz’s black bathing suit

attacked by jackdaws (p. 142)

55

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member of the animal kingdom, ­humans had some submission gestures—­ bowing, removing of hats, falling to the knees—­that had coevolved with their ­limited ability to inflict damage with bare hands. But such gestures worked only when the aggressor and his victim ­were in close, hand-­to-­ hand combat. What would happen when the delicate balance of instinct and inhibition was upset, when the evolution of submission gestures could not keep pace with our rapid acquisition of guns and bombs? “The day w ­ ill come,” Lorenz concluded ominously, “when two warring factions ­will be faced with the possibility of each wiping the other out completely. S ­ hall 21 we then behave like doves or like wolves?” Just as the doves in the unnatural proximity of the cage, the man with his fin­ger on the trigger could not rely on any inbuilt mechanisms of self-­control. Lorenz did not reserve this argument only for his popu­lar works; the same claims appeared in his scientific papers of this period. In 1949, in a paper delivered at a symposium of experimental biologists in Cambridge, E ­ ngland, and that marked his reemergence into the scientific community ­after the war, the ethologist assured his audience: “We have particularly urgent reasons to want insight into the causal context of ‘instinct.’ With atomic bombs in its hands and with the endogenous aggressive drives of an irascible ape in its central ner­vous system, modern humanity . . . ​has got very thoroughly out of balance.”22 Similarly, in his 1950 paper “Part and Parcel in Animal and ­Human Socie­ties,” Lorenz used aggression to illustrate the delicate equilibrium between instinctive be­hav­ior patterns and the elicitory stimuli that release them. “­There is no single organism capable of self-­defense, . . . ​no large carnivore capable of killing prey, which does not possess a quite par­tic­ul­ ar system of inhibitions, innate schemata, and releasers extensively preventing the killing of conspecifics,” so that members of a species would not exterminate each other.23 Thus a wolf could “with one bite rip out the jugular veins of a conspecific” ­unless social inhibitions prevented the attack. Again, Lorenz claimed that the victim would pre­sent a defenseless part of its body, in response to which the dominant animal could not bite.24 And again Lorenz drew the contrast between such carnivores and pigeons, hares, deer, and other “symbols of gentleness,” to show how easily artificial situations could upset the evolutionary equilibrium. Just as domesticated animals—as Lorenz had long argued—­lost inhibitory restraints on their instincts, and caged doves pecked each other to death, so our modern context upset the balance between our killing instincts and our meager social inhibitions. For Stone Age man, one or two 56

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outbursts of rage a week served a purpose, to ward off rivals and maintain a territory. But modern man, in his “police protected existence,” did not know how to h ­ andle his buildup of endogenously produced aggressive energy; what­ever submission rituals he practiced ­were peculiarly ­in­effec­tive in mass, anonymous society. Developing the King Solomon’s Ring argument, Lorenz wrote in “Part and Parcel,” “If one now imagines that such an excitable and vicious creature is quite suddenly presented with a ‘more humane’ method of killing, whose extremely rapid operation completely excludes functioning of the described inhibition-­releasers, then one can understand the terrible consequences which the invention of weapons—­from the hand-­axe to the atom bomb—­had and has for mankind.” He used his animal fable to illustrate the point: “The biological situation is fundamentally the same as if a gruesome freak of nature had suddenly equipped the turtle-­dove . . . ​with the beak of a raven, but without at the same time fitting the dove with the inhibitory mechanisms which are correlated with the presence of this weapon in the raven.” In the h ­ uman case, the distance between aggressor and victim rendered ancient inbuilt inhibitory responses totally in­effec­tive. An other­wise normal person became able to “apply fin­ger pressure to deliver up thousands . . . ​ to a horrible death.”25 In Lorenz’s view, this dire result called for only one response. Reverse the artificiality: make the armed man realize, on an emotional level, just what he was d ­ oing—­and hope that an inhibition might kick in. Relying on rational morality was not enough; instinct had to be interposed into a situation that had rendered it irrelevant. He ended the 1950 article on the same note of warning that had concluded King Solomon’s Ring: “At the moment humanity represents a functional entity that has gone fundamentally awry. The misunderstanding between the development of the weapon and the inhibitions against using it threatens to extinguish mankind.”26

Aggression: The So-­Called Evil The parable of the doves and the wolves convinced Lorenz that aggression could be neutralized, halted, rendered harmless. But the Cichlid fish taught him that the aggression instinct possessed a key constructive power. As the German title of Lorenz’s book put it, aggression was only Das Sogennante Böse, the so-­called evil. When properly discharged, aggression was the most formative and fundamental of social instincts, 57

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subtly if ironically responsible for the bonds of love that helped to keep individuals together. The burden of Lorenz’s book was to stake this claim and explain what it meant for both animal and ­human socie­ties. On Aggression contains three main thematic threads. The first presented intraspecific aggression as an instinct, explained its social functions, and outlined the characteristics it shared with other instincts. Aggression, Lorenz claimed, helped disperse animals throughout an area, preserving each species by driving its members to colonize all corners of their territory. Aggression aided the production of high-­quality offspring by motivating rival fights to select the strong and weed out the weak; and once ­those young w ­ ere born, aggression allowed the brood to defend itself. Within the brood, aggression worked to establish ranking order: “Since all social animals [­were] ‘status seekers,’ ” each had to compete against its fellows to find its proper place in the social hierarchy or “pecking order.” Lorenz established his firm Darwinism, asking in what ways an organ or trait furthered the survival of a species, and refusing to admit the per­sis­tence of any trait that served no adaptive purpose, such as the “death drive” of classical psychoanalysis. But he also made clear that Darwinian se­lection was not infallible, did not inexorably work for the good, and often fell far short of perfection. Once a species had come to master its environment—­once its existence was no longer endangered and the strug­gle to survive no longer paramount—­further competition between members of that species could produce useless or even harmful traits. The overgrown, unwieldy wings of the male Argus pheasant, attractive to the female but incapable of flight, was one of Lorenz’s key examples, as was the “rushed existence” of Western, civilized, industrialized man, the “grotesque state of affairs to which commercial competition can lead.”27 As part of this first thematic thread, Lorenz explained that, like all other instincts, aggression was endogenously produced and could burst out spontaneously ­under enough built-up pressure. He introduced the ethological concept of ritualization, an evolutionary pro­cess whereby certain movement patterns lost their original function and became fixed, symbolic ceremonies, new and autonomous instincts that could now serve entirely dif­fer­ent purposes. The pro­cess was analogous to the cultural development of rituals or ceremonies in ­human society; like h ­ uman “manners” or customs, t­ hese ritualized instincts usually served to form a bond or maintain social cohesion. Lorenz emphasized that instincts ­were not broad, all-­encompassing drives, but ­were more properly conceived of as 58

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be­hav­ior patterns composed, like a mosaic, of small-­scale ele­ments “as unchangeable in their form as the hardest skeletal component.”28 The big four—­hunger, sexuality, flight, and aggression—­were by no means the only instincts; many evolutionarily younger instincts, developed through ritualization, could compete with them. Lorenz referred to this complex interaction as “the ­great parliament of instincts.”29 In the second thematic thread of On Aggression, Lorenz took his decisive step beyond King Solomon’s Ring. He began with the argument familiar to readers of the e­ arlier work: animals endowed with “natu­ral weaponry” evolved, through ritualization, submissive or appeasing gestures, active drives that worked to inhibit aggression.30 But On Aggres­ sion did not stop with appeasement gestures. Lorenz now maintained that certain instinctive rituals served to divert and redirect the aggressive attack from one potential conspecific target to another, thereby cementing a bond of friendship, even love, between the aggressor and his original would-be victim. As a result, Lorenz claimed, personal bonds—­discriminations between one individual and another—­appeared for the first time in the evolutionary history of animal socie­ties. Species that exhibited such individual recognition contrasted with t­ hose that did not. The flock, for example, was a collection of anonymous individuals, a herd of buffalo or a herring shoal, that came together only for the sake of self-­protection. In the species that Lorenz studied, on the other hand, animals lived in distinct groups held together by bonds of affection between recognizable and distinguishable individuals. The Cichlid bond was the quin­tes­sen­tial example: when the aggression elicited by the partner was canalized in the direction of the territorial neighbor, the bond between the aggressor and his mate was strengthened. A be­hav­ior pattern motivated by aggression was transformed into a “love ceremony which forms a strong tie between ­those that participate in it. This means neither more nor less,” Lorenz said, “than converting the mutually repelling effect of aggression into its opposite.” The per­for­mance of such an instinctive ceremony demanded that the animal aim its display at “the personally known partner.”31 Similarly, in the triumph ceremony of greylag geese, a gander proceeded to attack a real or apparent e­ nemy, then returned victorious, “greeting loudly,” to an exultant reunion with his f­ amily. Again the bond was enhanced when aggression was redirected against an “outsider.” Lorenz seemed most moved by the greylag ceremony b ­ ecause of the enduring nature of the personal bond created by the redirected attack. Wild 59

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greylags offered the noblest example of animal fidelity. Lorenz believed that greylag “marriages” could last a lifetime, and that they ­were based on unconditional and unchanging love for the partner. His goose Ada, a ­widow several times over, found “in the ninth year of her life . . . ​a grande passion in the person of a hitherto unmated gander . . . ​and remained faithful to him for the rest of her life.” Nor w ­ ere the pairings always heterosexual: two ganders, Max and Kopfschlitz, performed the triumph ceremony with each other, the louder and more enthusiastically the longer they had been parted. Though they both mated and bred successfully with geese, they obviously preferred each other to anyone e­ lse.32 In the third thematic thread of the book, Lorenz brought out the ­human implications of the argument, hinted at throughout but made explicit in the final chapters. He felt no compunction about using seemingly ­human emotional terms—­falling in love, greeting, marriage, grief—to describe animals’ states of mind. Drawing on his long-­standing assumption that emotions w ­ ere the subjective side of instincts, the biological substrate that linked animal and h ­ uman, he felt justified in “dropping the quotation marks” when he spoke of animal emotions. If animal and ­human ner­ vous systems ­were similar, so also must their subjective pro­cesses be. “We cannot know what a gander is feeling when he stands about displaying all the symptoms of ­human grief on the loss of his mate, or when he rushes at her in an ecstasy of triumph on finding her again. But we cannot help feeling,” Lorenz observed, “that what­ever he may experience is closely akin to our own emotions in an analogous situation.”33 His human-­animal crossovers flowed in both directions. Not only ­were animals consistently described in ­human terms, but ­humans also needed to become aware of their own animal instincts. ­Human laughter, he theorized, originated as an appeasement ceremony. H ­ uman moral ideals and values ­were based on instinctive foundations; social norms and customs sprang not from reason or culture alone, but from that broad biological substrate that all ­humans shared and that united us with animals. But Lorenz’s aim in this third thread was more than simply to underscore this basic, if still controversial, Darwinian point. He also intended to issue a prophecy about the fate of modern civilization if this instinctual heritage was not acknowledged and dealt with. ­Human society, Lorenz warned, was threatened by the lethal combination of our pent-up aggressive drives and the uncontrolled growth of our material possessions, particularly our weapons. As in King Solomon’s Ring, ­here again he asserted that we had evolved no instinctive inhibi60

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tions to control our use of t­ hese “artificial weapons,” that man was essentially “the dove suddenly equipped with the beak of a raven.” Our weapons made killing terribly easy by imposing a distance between the ­human aggressor and his victim. This distance too was a par­tic­ul­ ar evil of the Cold War world: in the “modern community,” Lorenz averred, t­here was “no legitimate outlet for aggressive be­hav­ior. . . . ​The hostile neighboring tribe, once the target at which to discharge phyloge­ne­tically programmed aggression, has now withdrawn to an ideal distance, hidden ­behind a curtain, if pos­si­ble of iron.”34 Much as he had once inveighed against the degenerative effects of domestication on barnyard animals, Lorenz now lamented the way that modern life alienated us not only from one another but also from our natu­ral and au­then­tic selves. In the onrush of the city, the crowds, the noise, “the phone ringing a­ fter dinner,” our brief and superficial contacts with too many ­people, traditional relationships ­were severed and shared values lost. Lorenz believed the answer to this looming tragedy was not to further suppress or submerge our animal selves, but to take a lesson from the animals. In his morality play, wild animals represented the uncorrupted ideal by which fallen humanity must lift itself back up. He had seen how animals redirected aggression to create bonds of love, and that hope led him to end On Aggression in a much more optimistic way than King Solo­ mon’s Ring. ­Couldn’t ­humans bring about the same sort of transformation as the Cichlid fish achieved? ­There was no doubt in Lorenz’s mind that the ­human aggressive urge was ineradicable and irrepressible, that “militant enthusiasm”—­the collective aggression of the mob—­was a truly autonomous instinct in man. Its physical signs seemed all too familiar to him. “­Every man of normally strong emotions knows, from his own experience,” Lorenz wrote, “the subjective phenomena that go hand in hand with the response of militant enthusiasm. A shiver runs down the back and . . . ​along the outside of both arms. One soars elated . . . ​one is ready to abandon all, for what seems to be a sacred duty.”35 And just as any other instinct, militant enthusiasm too responded to its customary eliciting stimuli: the inspiring leader, the mob’s feeling of youthfulness and invincibility, the seemingly righ­teous cause—­just as the lock opened to the right key, just as the duckling imprinted on the first mother-­like object it saw. But the very instinctiveness of group aggression gave Lorenz cause to hope. What if the instinct could be caught, just at the right moment, when it was on the verge of brimming over, but instead of being released 61

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by the usual stimuli—­Huns or Jews, Bolshevism or Fascism—­the dehumanized other—it was discharged at more productive substitute objects? Lorenz suggested relieving aggressive drives in sports contests, exchanging mob vio­lence for team spirit. Perhaps aggression could even be channeled in the ser­vice of a truly g­ reat cause, directed against the common enemies of all mankind—­hunger, disease, ignorance—­and thereby create bonds among h ­ uman beings, just as the triumph ceremony did for greylag geese. “The princi­ple of the bond formed by having something in common which has to be defended against outsiders remains the same, from cichlids defending a common territory or brood, right up to scientists defending a common opinion and—­most dangerous of all—­fanatics defending a common ideology. In all ­these cases,” he concluded, “aggression is necessary to enhance the bond.”36 Beguiled as he was by the alchemy of aggression—­the transmutation of hate into love—­Lorenz’s last chapter offered an “avowal of optimism.” He did not return to the aquar­ium and to the fighting fish that inspired his hope, and thus he left one question unasked and unanswered. In the Cichlid drama that he had described, what happened to the third actor— the other male who served as the target of the attacker’s rage? Was it just a sham fight? Or did that other fish actually become a bloody sacrifice? Lorenz never told us. The story, and the book, ended with his firm conviction: the creation of loving relationships, and thereby of a peaceful society, hinged on the presence of the despised outsider.

Storr before Lorenz Storr arrived at a similar destination to Lorenz—at a conception of aggression as inbuilt, necessary, and productive—­but by an entirely dif­fer­ent route: not by the study of animal be­hav­ior, but by a close professional acquaintance with the mentally ill. Long before he met Lorenz in 1963, spurred by the patients in his psychotherapeutic practice, Storr was already searching for a positive way to understand aggression, a feature of ­human life he saw too often misunderstood, ignored, and disparaged. Storr’s belief in a healthy aggressiveness, an assertive, striving impulse within each one of us, may have had its roots in his own unassertive childhood.37 Born in 1920 in Hampstead, E ­ ngland, Anthony Storr grew up in London, in the “privileged seclusion” of Westminster Abbey, where his ­father was a canon and l­ ater a sub-­dean.38 A lonely, sickly child whose siblings ­were much older than he, young Anthony was sent to boarding 62

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school, where he was bullied, and ­later attended Winchester College, where he was also “bitterly unhappy.” M ­ usic provided the only solace to his misery; he played viola and piano and was sometimes allowed, to his delight, to sit in the organ loft at Westminster during per­for­mances. At Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he read medicine, Storr lost any remnants of his Christian faith. His moral tutor ­there, the novelist and phi­ los­op ­ her C. P. Snow, convinced the young man to follow his ambition to pursue psychiatry. “I owed him a tremendous debt,” Storr recalled many years ­later. “He was the first person who made me feel I might be good at anything.” In 1941 Storr was granted a war­time courtesy degree and exempted from military ser­vice ­because of his asthma. He continued his medical training at Westminster Hospital Medical School (1941–1944) and did an internship at Runwell Hospital.39 From 1947 to 1950 Storr worked for the psychiatrist Aubrey Lewis at the Maudsley Hospital. Along with his new hire Hans Eysenck, Lewis aimed to establish clinical psy­chol­ogy as a scientific discipline and as a feeder of scientific knowledge to the medical specialty of psychiatry.40 The strict demarcation that Lewis and Eysenck drew between science and medicine at the Maudsley may have reinforced Storr’s lifelong perception of the divide, and on which side of it he belonged, especially given his fear of Lewis: “Once you had suffered the experience of presenting a case at one of his Monday morning conferences, no other public appearance, ­whether on radio, TV, or the lecture platform, could hold any terrors for you.” 41 Storr considered himself a doctor, not a scientist. “Psychotherapy is not a science but an art,” he wrote. Its practitioner’s aim was to get “an empathic grasp of the personalities of his patients which w ­ ill go beyond a merely intellectual appreciation” even as he “retain[s] a mea­sure of objectivity.” 42 Storr received his degree in psychological medicine in 1951, and entered analy­sis with the psychiatrist Edward Armstrong Bennet, an En­glish disciple of Carl Jung.43 Having joined the Jungian Society for Analytical Psy­chol­ogy, Storr wrote articles and reviews for its journal during the 1950s while practicing psychotherapy in an office on Harley Street in London. In 1960 he wrote a popu­lar article for the New Statesman protesting psychiatrists’ war­time involvement in the interrogation and ­torture of prisoners of war. The article led to Storr’s ser­vice on a government committee to outlaw psychological torture, and represented the first step in his emergence as the public “face of psychiatry.” 44 That step was consolidated with the 1960 publication of Storr’s The Integrity of the 63

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Personality, a book with a self-­help flair that aimed to make the mystery of psychological development comprehensible to a popu­lar audience.45 Never liking to be considered a slavish follower of any one psychoanalyst, Storr sal­vaged the dif­fer­ent parts of his therapeutic approach from an array of non-­Freudian theorists. From Jung, Storr borrowed the ideas of healthy psychological development as a pro­cess of self-­assertion, and of personality as an integrated ­whole. In Jung’s view, the “pro­cess of individuation” took each individual along his own natu­ral and proper path of development.46 Personality was an attainment, not something given; neurotic symptoms arose whenever one strayed too far from one’s own path and failed to fulfill one’s potential. From W. Ronald D. Fairbairn and from Bowlby, both object-­relations theorists, Storr a­ dopted the claim that achieving maturity was a ­matter of developing mature relationships. In opposition to the Freudian image of the autonomous (male) adult, freed from the dependencies that Freud characterized as childish, Storr believed that dependence upon ­others was not “infantile” but necessary to self-­realization: a man in isolation was a man without individuality. The “touchstone of adulthood” was a “full relationship with the opposite sex.” 47 Following Fairbairn, Storr designated the final stage of emotional development “mature dependence.” 48 From Alfred Adler, Storr borrowed the idea that “striving for superiority” was a “dominant motive” in ­human life; but Adler disappointed him by ­later modifying this “­will to power” into a “striving for perfection” and imagining that a harmoniously cooperative ­human community could replace competitive striving.49 Storr thought that Adler’s dream of replacing strife with cooperation was not only entirely unrealistic, but actually militated against psychological health. For Storr, self-­assertion, differentiation from o ­ thers, and even competition w ­ ere the forces impelling a person along the road to adulthood. Combining ­these ideas in Integrity of the Personality, Storr argued that growth ­toward maturity, ­toward realization of one’s inner personality and potential, occurred as one constructed relationships with o ­ thers. But ­these relationships, w ­ hether of child and parent, or husband and wife, or friend and friend, implied a certain kind of separateness, a willingness to assert oneself as dif­fer­ent from the partner. “A certain opposition to ­others in adult life is necessary,” Storr wrote, “if the personality is to be maintained as a separate entity.”50 Such mature relationships cut a m ­ iddle swath between domination on the one hand and subordination on the other. A parent should not try to bend a child to his w ­ ill, nor gratify his 64

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e­ very whim, but allow the child to emerge as his own self, to accept him as a w ­ hole ­human being, and to give him the space to become one. The relationship between therapist and patient could model this balance between reliance on ­others and self-­assertion. In characterizing the type of self-­assertion he meant, Storr spoke in terms of “aggression.” At all stages of the life cycle, “a certain aggressiveness is necessary for the maintenance of a separate existence,” and “aggression is necessary for development, for separateness, for the achievement of differentiation from the parents.” At the same time, however, he recognized that “aggression” had negative connotations: “To use the word ‘aggression’ in connexion with the dignity and in­de­pen­dence of the mature personality is to create a wrong impression,” Storr wrote. “All affirmation of the personality is ‘aggressive’—­but ­there is no word which conveys the idea of aggression without hostility, which is the concept I am trying to convey.”51 In Integrity of the Personality, Storr was casting about for a way to identify and define this concept of healthy aggression. The prob­lem was that only two options existed, as it seemed to him, for understanding aggression. On the one hand, t­ here was the Freudian view, which portrayed aggression as a “death drive” to be repressed; in this view men ­were “inescapably bound to be hostile and destructive.”52 On the other hand, ­there was the frustration / aggression hypothesis, which held that u ­ nder ideal circumstances aggression could be made to dis­appear. But neither of ­these alternatives satisfied Storr; neither captured the positive work that he felt healthy aggression should do, and that he saw it capable of d ­ oing for patients in his psychotherapeutic practice. Patients often presented, he observed, as dissociation of personality, a disavowal or outright rejection of their own sexual or aggressive impulses, usually out of fear that their parents w ­ ouldn’t approve. Storr thought the dissociation could be healed, and integrity of the personality achieved, through relationship with another person (for example, a psychotherapist) who accepted the patient as a w ­ hole, taking t­ oward him an attitude of “unprejudiced objectivity,” so that the patient could begin to accept himself. When this happened, the “aggressive energy” which had been “locked up in symptoms” in the patient could find “expression in life.”53 The dissociation from aggressive fantasies meant the aggressive energy could not be used, and it was t­ oward reintegration and productive use of that aggression that Storr’s practice was aimed. But how to establish that aggression could be productive? This was the very question that Lorenz helped Storr to answer. In 1960, the 65

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concept of “healthy aggression” was for Storr almost a contradiction in terms, a prob­lem in search of a solution. By 1963, however, Storr was deploying Lorenzian ethology to solve it. Having encountered Lorenz’s work in the pages of Bowlby’s writings, Storr used ethology to fill in the piece of the puzzle that he felt psychoanalysis had thus far missed: the concept of lifelong healthy aggression, of aggression that both aided in self-­development and featured in mature relationships. In ethology, particularly in Das Sogennante Böse, Storr found a way to understand aggression as positive and constructive, as playing a real role in life. The concept revised Storr’s thinking. ­Because, in Lorenz’s framework, aggression could be construed positively, as something other than a death instinct, Lorenz gave Storr further reason to endorse the ­analytic alternatives to orthodox Freudianism. And b ­ ecause Storr could now conceive of something called “healthy aggression” anchoring the life course and helping to constitute mature object-­relations, Lorenz gave him the scientific backing to pursue his own analytic approach. Storr encountered Lorenz at a moment of uncertainty in his own ­career and used the ethologist’s work to solve his own practical prob­lem. Storr’s encounter with ethology also happened at a moment of crisis for psychoanalysis more generally, at least as he portrayed it. With the proliferation of analytic schools, Storr wondered if ­there could be any objective way to tell which one was right. Noting that he had been trained as a Jungian, he conceded that his Freudian and Kleinian colleagues often achieved results with patients that w ­ ere “neither worse nor better” than his own.54 Despite his protestations that he was no scientist, Storr worried ­whether psychotherapy would ever reach true scientific status. All science was subjective, he believed, but in psychoanalysis speculation seemed even more than usually rampant. “Some sort of scheme is necessary,” Storr implored his fellow psychotherapists, “if we are able to make valid observations about infantile be­hav­ior” or understand immature emotional reactions in adults.55 In Lorenzian ethology Storr fi­nally found the certifiably objective framework for which he had been searching. Having the support of this higher-­status natu­ral science helped Storr bring order to the turmoil that was psychoanalysis. Just as Bowlby had sought in ethology corroboration for attachment theory and used instances of corroboration as a sign of the truth of his theory, so Storr also turned to ethology for help in charting the correct course in a diverse and often divisive analytic landscape.56

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The Convergence of the Twain Lorenz and Storr met in person for the first time at a symposium chaired by John Bowlby at the British Museum of Natu­ral History in London in October 1963. Timed to coincide with the publication of Das Sogennante Böse, and borrowing that book’s subtitle, the symposium was called “The Natu­ral History of Aggression.”57 The use of the term “aggression,” which had a meaning in biology just as it did in international relations, gave the symposium the appearance of a unified object of study across disciplines, and the invited speakers included zoologists and psychologists as well as sociologists and historians. But the speakers gave far from unqualified approval to Lorenz’s views. Instead of producing consensus, the natu­ral scientists lined up on one side, ­under the banner of Lorenzian ethology, while the social scientists remained in intransigent opposition, and the two sides seemed to talk past each other. As Robert Ardrey said l­ater, it was “as if some defect in the meeting room’s acoustics . . . ​prevented one side of the ­house from hearing what the other side was saying.”58 In the midst of this discord, Storr proved himself Lorenz’s staunchest ally. In their introduction to the symposium proceedings, the zoologists J. D. Carthy and F. J. Ebling reiterated all the assumptions of Lorenz’s recently published book. Like Lorenz, they emphasized the symposium’s focus on intraspecific aggression, rather than predation, and the comparability of animal and ­human be­hav­ior. They quoted Lorenz’s words: “­There cannot be any doubt, in the opinion of any biologically minded ­scientist that intraspecific aggression is, in Man, just as much of a spontaneous instinctive drive as in most other higher vertebrates.”59 Other animals, the zoologists claimed, ritualized their aggression, transformed it into display and threat, submission and appeasement, and thereby diverted it into harmless channels. But “man appear[ed] to be an exception,” the only animal whose fights often devolved into killing.60 To account for man’s unique situation, Carthy and Ebling proffered the Lorenzian explanation: man’s rapid development of weapons had outpaced the evolution of inhibitory, ritualizing be­hav­iors. Herein lay an impor­tant moral lesson: ­human beings must learn from the animals and find a way to “understand, ritualize, or other­wise control” their aggression in the absence of the other animals’ built-in safeguards. The dire need to find a substitute for war, to discharge the h ­ uman aggression instinct in ritual rather than in mutually assured destruction, motivated the symposium’s conveners. 67

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­ hether their subjects w W ­ ere birds, insects, or apes, the other biologists at the symposium also upheld the Lorenzian claims that conspecifics rarely fought overtly, and that only in conditions of overcrowding did the normal regulatory rituals fail and aggression turn lethal. In his own talk, Lorenz stressed the redirection of the attack from mate to neighbor, a pro­ cess that singled out the mate as an individual, “the animal with the home valence.” “I d ­ on’t think I could find a more honorific title for my wife,” Lorenz quipped.61 As in his 1963 book, Lorenz maintained that such bond be­hav­ior occurred only in animals that displayed intraspecific aggression. The social scientists at the symposium departed radically from this Lorenzian conception. The psychiatrist Denis Hill, while declaring that “animal studies” provided support for “the theory of the primacy of an innate ‘instinct’ proposed by Freud,” nonetheless also maintained that aggression is caused by frustration, a conception that Lorenz specifically and vehemently rejected.62 The sociologist Stanislav Andreski argued in his contribution, “The Origins of War,” that “as nothing of the sort exists among the mammals this institution must be the creation of culture,” thereby rupturing the symposium’s smooth continuity between the dif­ fer­ent forms of aggression.63 In the strongest criticism of Lorenz, the historian John Burton argued that ­there was no evidence that aggression was a prime motivator in individual ­human beings. But even if t­here w ­ ere, Burton continued, it would not follow that states ­were perforce “aggressive.” Nations did not have the attributes of persons; speaking of wife beating and war as if they had a single root was entirely fallacious. The equation between the personal and the po­liti­cal was also ethically questionable: when ethologists asserted that ­there ­were aggressive tendencies in individuals and nations, they actually encouraged such be­hav­ior and should be held accountable when it occurred.64 Lorenz responded to the critique by reasserting the continuity: “No politician could make men r­ eally fight, if it w ­ ere not for the very archaic, instinctive reactions of the crowd on which to play.” 65 Of the eight social scientists pre­sent, only two broke ranks and joined the ethologists. One of them was Anthony Storr.66 The psychiatrist began by criticizing the social scientific approaches that he felt w ­ ere clearly wrong. “Like most psychotherapists nowadays . . . ​I cannot accept Freud’s idea of a ‘death instinct,” he said, adding that the Freudian conception of an entropic, self-­destructive drive, in competition with the plea­sure princi­ple, was completely unbiological. No one schooled in 68

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Darwinian evolution could accept an instinct that worked against the survival of its possessor. Storr also denounced the frustration / aggression hypothesis for ignoring the indelible aspect of aggression, its rootedness in ­human nature even in the absence of situational f­ actors: it had to be “more than a response to frustration.” 67 Storr then turned directly to Lorenz’s claim that aggression served a positive function, and underscored its relevance for humanity: “Man’s aggression . . . ​is an attempt to assert himself as an individual, to separate himself from the herd, to find his own identity.” Taking a leaf from the analysts Alfred Adler and Erik Erikson, both critics of Freud, Storr connected their notion of a positive striving ­toward individuality with the ethological conception of a life-­sustaining instinct. “Aggression and creation march hand in hand”—­whether creation of social bonds in geese or of ­human works of art—­and only when “suppressed or disowned” did aggression become dangerous. Broadening the meaning of aggression even further, Storr argued that “in our efforts to realize our full potential, strug­gle and opposition are absolutely necessary.” It followed that war, at least in its “old fashioned form,” must have served some deep-­seated needs in ­human nature. But now that nuclear weapons had made war impossible, ­human beings had to find some substitute for it. Picking up on Lorenz’s suggestion in Das Sogennante Böse that sports competitions could serve as a productive way to channel h ­ uman aggression, Storr went even further by suggesting that the space race “might be serving the function of a ritual conflict between East and West.” 68 Storr’s support clearly mattered to Lorenz. When other conferees seemed to be straying, Lorenz appealed to Storr to return them to the fold: “I think we ­ought to come back to the functional definition of intraspecific aggression as attempted by Dr. Storr and myself in our pre­ sen­ta­tions.” 69 And Storr’s underlining of the positive and constructive aspect of aggression gave Lorenz the confirmation he needed. The ethologist made clear with which discipline he sought alliance: “The beginning synthesis between the findings of ethology and psychoanalysis does not leave any doubt,” Lorenz proclaimed confidently, “that what Sigmund Freud has called the ‘death drive’ is nothing other than the miscarry­ing of this instinct which . . . ​is as indispensable for survival as any other.” Using the consensus achieved between himself and Storr as an indicator of the truth of his claim, Lorenz pointed to “the most satisfying agreement on this point between psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and ethologists.”70 69

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Lorenz’s support also clearly mattered to Storr. At the beginning of his talk, Storr emphasized his lack of scientific credentials: he noted that he was not a scientist but a doctor, a psychiatrist specializing in psychotherapy. His view of h ­ uman nature was “circumscribed by the consulting room,” and he claimed to feel “ill at ease” before an audience of scientists whose opinions [­were] backed by experiment and verification.”71 The support of one of t­ hose very scientists was crucial. With Lorenz’s backing, Storr used ethological evidence to expand his consulting room view, to identify a kind of aggression that was healthy, positive, and constructive, and give it a grounding in biology: a kind of aggression that Freud, with his death instinct, had doubted, but that Storr now managed to give new psychoanalytic life.

Ethology as a H ­ uman Science The debate at the 1963 symposium offered Lorenz a foretaste of the controversy that awaited him ­after the publication of On Aggression in En­ glish. T ­ here too Lorenz faced the criticism that an observer of geese could have nothing to say about men. And ­there too Storr provided unshakeable support. With the publication of his 1968 book ­Human Aggression, Storr became a core member of Lorenz’s band of aggressionists, along with Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris, the group identified and derided by their critics as “pop ethologists.” Storr’s key function in this group was to bridge the animal-­human boundary. Speaking as a psychiatrist, presenting himself as an authority in the ­human condition, Storr deflected criticism from Lorenz and helped the ethologist smooth over any potential discontinuities in moving from animals to h ­ umans. In diagnosing a host of psychological and social evils in terms of the proper disposal of aggression, Storr took concepts that had been developed to explain animal be­hav­ior and applied them unproblematically to ­humans. In the pro­cess of interpreting ­human prob­lems as animal prob­lems, Storr gained the backing of biological science for his own psychotherapeutic practice. ­Human Aggression began with Storr’s by-­now-­accustomed depiction of the analytical landscape as riven by controversy—­specifically, controversy over aggression. No other analyst had yet gotten aggression right, or understood its legitimate place in ­human life, b ­ ecause their definitions ­were uniformly negative. Freudians clung to a thoroughly unbiological death instinct. Kleinians equated aggression with hatred and envy and 70

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speculated, without any verifiable evidence, that such feelings existed in the minds of infants. Adlerians theorized that aggression could and should be eliminated.72 In this contentious field, ethology served as lodestar, an unerring guide to a new and much more scientifically grounded conception. Adopting Lorenz’s view that intraspecific aggression was an innate drive in animals, Storr affirmed its existence also in ­human beings, as he had in the 1963 symposium. Aggression was normal and natu­ral, not something alien; like the sexual drive, it sought discharge and fulfillment, and was therefore definitely not caused by frustration. Storr emphasized aggression’s role in maintaining ­human social bonds and social structure, and its positive and constructive functions in h ­ uman life. Aggression was implicated in the gaining of mastery over the environment, the push ­toward individuality, the affirmation of identity and in­de­pen­dence, the separation from ­mother, and the rebellion against one’s fellows necessary to becoming one’s own person. Aggression underlay creativity; having an opponent to argue with was actually a good ­thing. “This same aggressive impulse which can lead to strife and vio­lence also underlies man’s urge to in­de­pen­dence and achievement,” Storr proclaimed. “An adult must needs continue to express at least part of his aggressive potential if he is to maintain his own autonomy.”73 Storr put psychiatry on a new ethological footing. Many va­ri­e­ties of ­mental illness—­depression, schizoid tendencies, paranoid hostility—­ resulted, he claimed, from aggression inappropriately and insufficiently discharged: ­either repressed or inhibited, turned inward or denied, or expressed against the wrong targets. Only when the aggressive impulse was frustrated, in fact, did it get deformed into hatred and other psychological ills. “The normal disposal of aggression requires opposition,” Storr asserted, and without it the child’s natu­ral aggression turned to rage, self-­ destruction, and ultimately, if suppressed long enough, to ­mental illness or criminality. Taking on a contingent of Lorenz’s critics, Storr lambasted as “naïve, liberal humanists” ­those academic psychologists who doubted aggression’s positive function and who argued that aggression was caused only by frustration. The frustration / aggression hypothesis was not only wrong but also dangerous to the m ­ ental health of ­those “frustration-­free” ­children who grew up u ­ nder its influence. Storr devoted an entire chapter of his 1968 book to the ethological themes of territory and ritual, reiterating and advancing Lorenz’s prophetic warning about modern warfare. Unlike other animals, ­humans 71

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­ ere incapable of ritualizing and deflecting their aggression b w ­ ecause they lacked built-in safeguards: modern long-­range weapons alienated individuals from their adversaries and prevented any inhibitions from kicking in. Trying to eliminate aggression and the ­human need for weapons was the wrong route, however: man was by nature a competitive, aggressive, territorial creature, and war, at least in old-­fashioned, pre-­atomic-­bomb form, served the essential purpose of draining off accumulated aggression. Some substitute for war must therefore be found, and like Lorenz, Storr envisioned sports as taking its place. Drawing on the ethologist’s recommendations, Storr asked, “Is it fantastic to suggest that the United Nations . . . ​might set aside part of its funds to institute a series of yearly international competitions?”74 Differentiating types of aggression according to gender also worked to help erase the animal-­human boundary. Lorenz had observed that among geese and fish, the male’s job was to redirect his aggression so that personal bonds ­were strengthened: it was the male that made the submissive gesture, he that skirted the direct attack or performed the triumph ceremony. Females in Lorenz’s world w ­ ere also aggressive, but their aggression always arose out of brood defense and lacked the distinctly creative aspect of the male’s. Storr then transported this gender difference directly into the ­human realm. Noting that “­there is a biologically appropriate way for males to be aggressive and another for the female,” he characterized male aggression as “operating more spontaneously in rivalry [and] territoriality,” while female aggression was reactive, usually to threats against her young.75 Just as male sexuality involved pursuit and penetration, the active virtues, the male’s aggressive drive sought ascendance over the environment. Moving seamlessly between animals and ­humans, biology and psy­chol­ogy, Storr claimed that men’s “undoubted superiority” in creative achievement stemmed from “their greater endowment of aggression.” The female, on the other hand, “who yields and submits,” found her strengths in providing love, bearing ­children, and making a home, in which tasks she found “no need to compete with men.”76 Though he was writing in 1968, five years a­ fter the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Storr was entirely unmoved by and unsympathetic to the second wave feminist movement, which he characterized as unnatural. For him, as for most of the other aggressionists, the argument that ­women should be treated as equal to men contravened ancient instincts and the sexes’ fundamentally dif­fer­ent natures and was therefore bent on impossible aims. While Lorenz had mused informally during 72

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the WHO discussions about the differences between male and female attitudes ­toward parenting, his speculations ­here found affirmation from an expert in ­human psy­chol­ogy.77 Nothing could symbolize more effectively the complete effacement of the animal-­human boundary than this alliance between an ethologist and a psychiatrist, an alliance that benefited both. No won­der that Storr dedicated his book to Lorenz “with admiration and affection,” or that Lorenz, who read it in page proofs, endorsed ­Human Aggression as “a real synthesis of psychoanalytical and ethological thought.”78 Storr, like Bowlby, represented a new breed of psychoanalyst, skeptical of Freud and trained in dif­fer­ent traditions, willing to challenge Freudian views of instinct and aggression and uniquely amenable to biological influence. Their private correspondence around the time of the publication of ­Human Aggression reflects the harmony of their perspectives. “I am half through with your ­human aggression,” Lorenz wrote Storr on January 16, 1968. “I have not the least criticism to offer, which of course does not mean much. We are prob­ably greatly over-­rating each other; the conviction that this man must be extremely intelligent, ­because he thinks exactly as I do, does not prove much ­after all, except that ­there are two chaps rather similar to each other.”79 Two weeks ­later, when he had finished the book, Lorenz pronounced himself “full of admiration.” Storr’s description of psychopathology rang true: “­After reading it one is immediately struck by the ­great number of examples that come to mind.”80 Lorenz shared his strategic portrayal of their critics as blinded by preconceptions and incapable of seeing the facts. Agreeing with the psychoanalyst that their opponents ­were “very stupid men, simply plain dumb,” Lorenz deemed it “absolutely convincing that Freud’s dichotomy into ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ and his putting aggression on the minus side, have made it impossible for many ­people, particularly for the optimistic American ideology, to accept the fact that aggression is an instinct.”81 The two offered each other mutual support and reinforcement in the face of opposition.

d Together Lorenz and Storr worked to naturalize aggression, turning it from an evil to be eradicated into a power­ful innate force to be channeled productively. Though stemming from two quite disparate disciplines, their ideas converged on the claim that aggression was something positive and that its expression was constitutive of social bonds, both animal 73

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and ­human. Having an opponent, they believed, a rival, a competitor—­a target at which to discharge one’s aggression—­was necessary and natu­ral, especially for males. Even war, at least in its old-­fashioned form of hand-­ to-­hand combat, provided essential social glue, a means by which the in-­ group stuck together. The relationship of mutual esteem that existed between ­these two men, the animal observer and the doctor, tells us much about how the claim for an aggression instinct reached a broad public stage. The claim did not propel itself automatically or inevitably t­ oward popularity. Instead, as he donned the mantle of social prophet and honed his message on h ­ uman civilization, Lorenz assembled a diverse co­ali­tion of supporters and defenders who ranged widely in background and experience; some, like Storr, had no direct ethological expertise at all. Bolstered by such alliances, Lorenz extended the explanatory range of ethology and its relevance to the ­human condition. The diverse sources of support insulated Lorenz from his detractors and allowed his ­career as a pop­ul­ ar­izer to soar unhindered by and untethered to the criticisms he received from fellow scientists. The unlikely alliances also expanded the discursive space of his popu­lar writing. On Aggression did not simply invite readers to partake in Lorenz’s domestic science, as had King Solomon’s Ring. The book also opened a broad public arena for discourse in which a very heterogeneous assortment of ­people came to discuss and debate Lorenz’s claims.

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CHAPTER THREE

Weapons Created Man And so this wealth of information concerning animal ways, placed before us by the new biology, must be regarded as a windfall in a time of ­human need. —­Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative

O

ne after­noon in February  1955, deep in the South African summer, Robert Ardrey stood in Raymond Dart’s office at the medical school of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. A late thunderstorm of the rainy season darkened the room, and the win­ dows rattled as a tunnel collapsed in a gold mine somewhere a mile under­ground. In his hands Ardrey held a humanlike jawbone—­not a modern bone, but a fossil, turned to stone ­after nearly 750,000 years in the earth. Nor was the bone fully ­human—­rather, it had belonged to an ancient ­human ancestor called Australopithecus africanus. Truly an ape­man—or perhaps an ape-­boy, for its owner had been only about twelve years old when he died. R ­ unning his fin­gers along the jaw, Ardrey was seized by a revelation.1 He had come to South Africa to meet Dart, the jawbone’s discoverer, a paleoanthropologist with a reputation for iconoclasm. Thirty years ­earlier, in 1924, the first Australopithecus africanus fossils had been discovered in a mine in Taungs, near Johannesburg. Dart had examined ­those remains, had given the species its official Latin name, which means “the southern ape from Africa,” and had claimed it was the most ancient ­human ancestor ever discovered, the missing link between apes and ­humans. Dart had used the find to argue that humankind had originated in Africa, not Asia, as most scientists then believed, and that the skulls of ­these protohumans had been small, apelike, though other­wise the creatures stood upright. Contrary to widely cherished opinion, a large braincase had apparently not been the original feature that demarcated apes 75

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from ­humans. Dart’s theories had rocked the anthropological world when he first announced them. But by the 1950s, as scientific consensus had fi­ nally come around to Dart’s views, the paleoanthropologist was formulating yet another explosive hypothesis about man’s origins. Ardrey peered at the specimen in his hands. The jawbone had been damaged—­badly and unmistakably. Both sides of the jaw had been cracked and split, the four front teeth ­were missing, and a dark, smooth dent marked the chin. Disease and accident could be ruled out as culprits—­only a blow to the face could have done the damage, and the boy had evidently died of it, for the fractures had not had time to knit. The injuries ­were too deep and wide to have been caused by stone or fist; only another bone—­the heavy leg bone of an antelope, deliberately fashioned for such use—­could have left such telltale marks. Holding the fossilized broken jaw, “staring into its headless, disconnected history,” Ardrey grasped the truth of Dart’s latest claim: this most ancient of h ­ uman ancestors had been killed with a weapon wielded by another Australopithecus. “The first recognizably ­human act,” Ardrey affirmed, “had been murder.”2 His visit to Dart’s office that day unfolded for Ardrey a view of the ­human past and of ­human nature that he found provocative and exhilarating. The earliest protohumans, Dart theorized, had been predators—­ hunters and killers—­and their killer instinct had been bred into modern ­humans during eons of evolution. But their aggressiveness and their use of weapons had also been responsible for the evolutionary transition from ape to man. Holding and striking with bone weapons required erect carriage and hands freed for manipulation—­developments that in turn fueled increasing brain size. “Weapons had produced man,” as Ardrey put it, “not man weapons.”3 It was aggression that had driven Australopithecus over the threshold, into full humanity. Meeting Dart changed the direction of Ardrey’s c­ areer. Ardrey was a writer by trade—­a novelist, playwright, and movie scriptwriter—­and by 1955 had already spent twenty years on Broadway and in Hollywood. But now he turned to the writing of popu­lar science books designed to persuade scientists, many of whom doubted Dart’s claims about original ­human vio­lence, and to reach as many lay readers as pos­si­ble. To achieve ­these dual aims, Ardrey presented Dart’s science as coming to the same conclusion that Lorenzian ethology did: that aggression had a positive value. Lorenz focused on the power of redirected aggression to construct bonds in animal and h ­ uman socie­ties, while Dart viewed aggression as the motor of ­human evolution. For both, aggression was intensely creative. 76

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Ardrey devoted his books to showing that Lorenzian ethology and Dart’s paleoanthropology coincided on this point—­the corroboration enhancing their credibility—­and that together they formed the two “wings” of a revolution that was ­going to sweep a new conception of ­human instinct into the biological and social sciences. Ardrey brought Dart out of the margins and made his theories impossible to dismiss. In African Genesis (1961) and The Territorial Imperative (1966) Ardrey emerged alongside Lorenz and Storr as an “aggressionist”—an articulate defender of the claim for a ­human killer instinct. Besides this main claim, Ardrey’s popu­lar books shared notable features with Lorenz’s. Like Lorenz, Ardrey presented a demo­cratic vision of science. While Lorenz had praised amateurs and opened his domestic science to them, Ardrey actually was an amateur. He had no formal scientific training and made no attempt to conceal the fact; instead, he flaunted it. In his popu­lar books, his status as a layman and his background in drama ­were presented not as liabilities but as qualifications for gaining insight into ­human nature and the sciences that encompassed it. Rejecting subservience to the scientists, Ardrey flipped the usual status hierarchy and asserted the authority of amateurs over elite professionals. Like Lorenz also, Ardrey imbued the sciences of aggression with po­ liti­cal meaning. While Lorenz had endowed ethology with the power to pull humankind back from the brink of nuclear war, Ardrey gave the sciences of h ­ uman nature an even broader mandate: to specify and enshrine the proper—­because most natu­ral—­social order. Since ­human instincts set strict limits to the pos­si­ble forms of social life, Ardrey argued, any authoritarian dictatorship that tried to contravene ­those limits was doomed. Only a system that respected the individual, that was most closely aligned with his inborn instincts, could prevail, and for Ardrey that system was cap­i­tal­ist democracy. In projecting a resolution of the Cold War’s entrenched stalemate in ­favor of the West, the sciences of h ­ uman nature offered, in Ardrey’s words, “a windfall in a time of ­human need.” 4 ­These values pervaded his popu­lar science books. In African Gen­ esis, Ardrey’s liberal politics of science was evidenced in the persona he ­adopted—as an artist, an amateur, and a critic of elites—­and in his vision of a science for the p ­ eople, which w ­ ere key parts of his popu­lar appeal. In the Territorial Imperative, Ardrey presented his broader po­liti­cal vision, which placed the concept of “instinct” on the side of individual rights and freedoms.5 But Ardrey was no newcomer to asserting the power of the individual in the face of overweening authority. Rather, his uptake of 77

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the sciences of ­human nature provided scientific confirmation of beliefs that he had long held, that w ­ ere s­ haped by his experience as a Hollywood scriptwriter and w ­ ere reflected even in his earliest writings for the stage.6

Drama and Politics Robert Ardrey was born in 1908 to a lower-­middle-­class f­ amily on the South Side of Chicago. From 1927 to 1930 he attended the University of Chicago, studying anthropology with Robert Redfield and playwriting with Thornton Wilder, who became his mentor in the theater. When he graduated during the depths of the G ­ reat Depression, Ardrey lived by a series of odd jobs and wrote novels, short stories, and plays. By the mid1930s, having convinced Wilder of his talent with a play about Polish immigrants, Ardrey moved to New York City and joined the experimental Group Theater.7 Ardrey was captivated by a type of drama called the “theatre of social protest,” or—­the term he preferred—­the “theatre engagé,” theater engaged with its times and bent on social activism and social justice.8 Propelled by the po­liti­cal sensibility that the lives of ordinary p ­ eople w ­ ere the stuff of high drama, he drew his characters “not from some theatrical wonderland but from the ­human gallery one passed through ­every day.” This belief in the “poetry of the common man” drove the work of the Group Theater.9 The Group, in David Halberstam’s words, was “a left-­ wing assemblage of talented, egocentric p ­ eople who ­were trying at once to build a new theater and a new left-­wing Amer­i­ca at the same time.”10 One of their earliest productions was Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, a play about a taxi strike that was sympathetic to the strikers, and that starred the young Greek American actor Elia Kazan in his first Broadway role. Ardrey took Odets’ play as his model. In 1938 Kazan made his Broadway debut as director of Ardrey’s Casey Jones, a play about railroaders, which examined the tyranny of machines over men’s lives. Ardrey’s first breakthrough success on the stage was Thunder Rock, directed by Kazan and performed by the Group on Broadway in 1939. Featuring an isolated light­house keeper visited by the ghostly survivors of a shipwreck a ­century e­ arlier, the play deals with the theme of hopefulness in the face of despair. Although the New York critics panned the play, it created a sensation in Eu­rope, where the war­time audiences ­were just as desperate as the characters. In London, it opened in 1940 during the Blitz, before audiences with gas masks in their laps, and in Berlin it was per78

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formed in a bombed-­out theater with recently released concentration camp inmates as actors.11 The success launched Ardrey’s ­career as a playwright. In 1946, his play Jeb explored the humanity and dignity of a disabled Black American World War II veteran in the Jim Crow South. Hollywood also bid for Ardrey’s talents, and for the next eigh­teen years he divided his writing time between stage and screen. In the late 1940s, the blacklist had a corrosive effect on the entertainment industry. The United States was in the grip of a Red Scare, and, ­because of the fear that movies could be vehicles for Communist propaganda, Hollywood became a principal target of anti-­Communist invective. Ardrey was himself never a card-­carrying member of the party, unlike his friend and colleague Kazan, who joined the Communist Party in 1934 (but renounced it a brief seventeen months ­later). “I myself believed the Party was a menace and should be outlawed,” Ardrey wrote ­later. “I did not believe that in a democracy t­ here was room for a secret organ­ization owing its highest loyalty to a foreign power.”12 Although the blacklist never targeted him directly, Ardrey was permanently scarred by the atmosphere of doubt, suspicion, and accusation that infected the studios. In 1946, Richard M. Nixon used the tactic of insinuating that his opponent had Communist sympathies to win a Republican congressional seat from California. The strategy disgusted Ardrey, and Nixon’s election made him into an “active Demo­crat.”13 By October 1947, the House Un-­ American Activities Committee was using the same smear tactic against Hollywood. That month nineteen Hollywood writers and directors w ­ ere subpoenaed to appear before the committee and testify w ­ hether they ­were or had ever been members of the Communist Party. Ultimately only ten writers ­were called, a group that became known as the Unfriendly Ten, for their refusal to answer the questions put to them by the committee. Congress voted to cite the Unfriendly Ten for contempt in late November 1947, and in the so-­called Waldorf Statement (named for the ­hotel in New York where it was drawn up), fifty power­ful Hollywood executives agreed that the Ten should be suspended without pay. The members of the Ten ended up serving prison sentences, some for as long as a year.14 In this context Ardrey felt compelled to act. In November 1947 he was elected to the po­liti­cal advisory committee of the Screen Writers Guild, the u ­ nion charged with protecting the economic interests of screenwriters. From that position he tried to defend the guild against the 79

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House committee, while the Hollywood studios did nothing to protect their employees. “I w ­ ill maintain that the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age came not with World War II,” he wrote ­later, “but with the studios’ failure to defend their contracted talent, and the enforcement of the blacklist. . . . ​ When they accepted not just the fate of the Unfriendly Ten, but undemonstrable rumors concerning this or that member of the film colony, the old Hollywood’s fate was in the dust-­bin.” He condemned the blacklist, and the entertainment industry’s complicity in it, as “sickening.”15 In 1948, as chairman of the guild’s po­liti­cal advisory committee, Ardrey helped to sponsor an antitrust lawsuit in reaction to the Waldorf Statement. Screenwriters Guild Inc. v. Motion Picture Association of Amer­ i­ca “charged the producers with collusion,” in Navasky’s words, “and its specific purpose was to squelch the blacklist.”16 Ultimately, however, fearing pos­si­ble retaliation against such a subversive action, the guild vetoed the lawsuit, and it was never pursued in court. Ardrey dated his disenchantment with Hollywood from the moment the suit was discarded. “Colleagues whom I thought I knew well, and liked, I began to find embarrassing to meet. I found myself ashamed—­not of myself, certainly— but of my fellow writers in the studio streets. As I recall it now, I was a victim of [Senator Joseph] McCarthy’s guilt by association.”17 Though Ardrey d ­ idn’t mention his friend Elia Kazan in this connection, he may well have been thinking of him. Kazan was subpoenaed and appeared before the House committee in 1952. At first refusing to testify, he reappeared several months ­later and named eight colleagues as members of the Communist Party.18 When Adlai Stevenson accepted the Demo­cratic Party nomination for the presidential election of 1952, Ardrey threw himself into the campaign, taking charge of “Hollywood for Stevenson” and writing a TV biography of the candidate. Stevenson, the governor of Illinois, was a reformer whose out­spoken defense of American ideals of freedom and whose criticism of McCarthyism appealed to Ardrey. Although Stevenson eventually lost to Eisenhower, Ardrey remembered in glowing terms, even years ­later, how he had become a follower of the Stevenson movement. “It was as if, half a continent away, a single man struck a hidden bell, and throughout the forests of the American soul . . . ​bells reverberated in response, bells that had never found voice before, bells unguessed joined in a wild, unpre­ce­dented clamor of purpose and hope, of resolve and thanksgiving.”19 Around the time of Stevenson’s defeat, Ardrey’s younger son Daniel was temporarily barred from nursery school ­because of rumors 80

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that his f­ ather was a Communist. The combination of events took their toll. “With real relief,” Ardrey wrote ­later, he and his ­family made their first extended trip abroad in the early 1950s.20 The damaging effects of the blacklist on c­ areer and personal relationships, even for t­ hose who w ­ ere not themselves blacklisted, became the theme of Ardrey’s creative work of this period. In 1952 he published Broth­ erhood of Fear, a novel about totalitarian terror. In 1954, Ardrey’s play Sing Me No Lullaby appeared on Broadway. The play concerned five college friends meeting for a reunion at Christmas 1955. One is a mathematician who had worked on a government atomic bomb proj­ect and whose Communist sympathies in the 1930s have made him an object of FBI suspicion. ­After an FBI agent shows up on Christmas Eve to grill the mathematician’s friends about him, it is revealed that the mathematician has been forced out of both his job and his home and now, with his pregnant wife, must leave the country. “He has no love for the Soviet Union,” one of the characters explains at the end. “He has nothing but contempt for American Communists. He is g­ oing, simply b ­ ecause he cannot live, any longer, in the United States of Amer­i­ca. He cannot work. At his own profession, or teach, or hold a job of any kind. Anywhere. In the smallest town. He cannot exist.”21 Even his relationships with his old college friends are ruined. At the end, however, one of the friends, an idealistic young politician who had renounced politics, vows to run again for Congress, to fight against McCarthyism and, as Ardrey put it, “do the dirty work of decency.”22 Although Ardrey’s own situation was not as dire as that of his characters, their disenchantment with American democracy reflected his. “This is a play about Amer­ic­ a,” one of the characters remarks at the beginning of the drama. “And if it’s sort of a mystery play, then it’s for a good reason. ­Because t­here is a mystery. What’s happened to us? What’s happened to Amer­i­ca?”23 His character’s plaintive question had become Ardrey’s own. If his po­liti­cal outlook as a moderate liberal had been forged on Broadway in the 1930s, his experience in Hollywood in the 1940s completed his disillusionment with liberalism. He had watched as seemingly impregnable demo­cratic ideals—­freedom, justice, individual rights—­went easily by the board before the groupthink and deceitfulness of McCarthyism. Unable to resist this latest form of oppression, liberals had grown pathetically weak. Ardrey’s response, however, was not to reject liberalism altogether, but to shore it up. His midcareer turn to science popularization was an attempt to find a secure footing for his liberal values. 81

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In an Antique Land It was in the context of red-­baiting that, in Hollywood in January 1955, Ardrey met Max Ascoli, the editor of a New York newsmagazine called The Reporter and an old friend. Ardrey volunteered to go to Africa to write on African politics, and Ascoli immediately promised to publish anything that Ardrey wrote. His subjects included the Mau Mau Uprising in ­Kenya—in which, beginning in 1950, disenfranchised Kikuyu ­people raided the farms of Eu­ro­pean settlers—­and its cruel suppression by the whites; the injustice of apartheid, established in 1948 as the official governmental doctrine of South Africa; and the brutal gold-­mining economy that supported that regime.24 Ardrey’s writings also pointed out the hy­ poc­risy of American criticism of ­these situations and attempted to make the white Afrikaner an understandable and even sympathetic figure. He ultimately produced five pieces for The Reporter, including semi-­ autobiographical short stories and essays.25 But before he left his home in Hollywood, Ardrey received a visit from another old friend, the Yale geologist Richard Foster Flint. Flint advised Ardrey to go to Johannesburg to seek out that destroyer of consensus, Raymond Dart.26 Australian-­born and London-­trained, Dart had come to Johannesburg in 1922 to direct the department of anatomy at the medical school of the University of the Witwatersrand. In 1925 he became world-­ renowned for his role in identifying the fossil remains found at Taungs. Australopithecus africanus, Dart theorized, was an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man, that flourished on the South African veldt during the Pleistocene, two million years ago.27 At first disputed, Dart’s reconstruction of an upright but small-­brained ­human ancestor gained support from Robert Broom, Dart’s colleague, who discovered Australopithecine fossils at other sites in South Africa, and from Louis and Mary Leakey, who revealed even more ancient specimens in Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. The exposure of the Piltdown hoax in the early 1950s fi­nally quashed the belief that ­human ancestors had been big-­brained.28 By then Dart had moved on to his next controversy. Throughout the 1940s he had been arguing that the Australopithecines w ­ ere carnivores, hunters who used “destructive implements,”29 and who possessed “advanced hunting habits” and the ability to use fire.30 In 1949, however, Dart’s descriptions of Australopithecine life began to emphasize violent 82

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killing instead of simply hunting. In “The Predatory Implemental Technique of Australopithecus,” Dart presented evidence that Australopithecus had engaged in “purposeful vio­lence” against baboons, “instrumental vio­ lence” involving the use of antelope humerus bones as weapons.31 He had noticed that many of the fossilized baboon skulls found associated with Australopithecine deposits bore a characteristic double depression—­the imprint, Dart believed, of the end of the long heavy leg bone wielded as a weapon. The baboons had met “sudden death” at the hands of an armed Australopithecus.32 In 1953, in “The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man,” Dart argued that Australopithecus had not only killed baboons and antelopes, but an array of other large animals, consumed their flesh, and used their bones, horns, and teeth as weapons. Moreover, Dart had found Australopithecine skulls that showed evidence of having been bludgeoned: they had also murdered each other. He identified this killing instinct as the central aspect of the ­human condition: “The loathsome cruelty of mankind to man forms one of his inescapable, characteristic, and differentiative features; and it is explicable only in terms of his carnivorous and cannibalistic origin.”33 Dart argued that the use of bone weapons to kill had preceded, and had led to, the development of the large ­human brain. Small-­brained Aus­ tralopithecus, using its hands to wield bones, acquired upright posture, and only l­ater a characteristic h ­ uman intelligence. The transition from ape to man, in Dart’s view, had been predatory, that is, had been produced through the use of weapons; standing erect and using hands had made demands on coordination and the ner­vous system that ultimately produced the enlarged brain. As Ardrey ­later put it, “What Dart put forward in his [1953] piece was the s­ imple thesis that man had emerged from the anthropoid background for one reason only: ­because he was a killer.”34 Ardrey’s arrival in Johannesburg in early 1955 meant that he was the first observer from the Northern hemi­sphere to see firsthand Dart’s evidence for ancestral vio­lence.35 When the two men met, Dart was attempting to defend his claims against a skeptical scientific establishment. Ardrey took up the cause, presenting Dart’s argument for man’s violent ancestry in “A Slight (Archaic) Case of Murder,” one of the articles he wrote for The Reporter. Both ­there and l­ater, in African Genesis, Ardrey portrayed himself as holding the bludgeoned jawbone of the twelve-­year old Australopithecus and as instantly being enthralled and captivated by Dart’s claim.36 83

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If Ardrey was convinced, the Eu­ro­pean and American scientific establishments w ­ ere not. In July of 1955, five months a­ fter his first meeting with Dart, the Third Pan-­African Congress on Prehistory convened in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia. ­There Dart presented his evidence that Australopithecus had wielded weapons of bone, horn, and tooth.37 But the international conference of anthropologists dismissed Dart’s theories with hardly a hearing, holding fast to the belief that hyenas had been responsible for collecting the animal bone piles always found at Australopithecus deposits. Sherwood Washburn, a Livingstone conferee and the dean of American physical anthropologists, while singling out hunting as “one of the main characteristics distinguishing man from the apes,” doubted w ­ hether evidence of hunting, much less murder, was pre­sent in the Lower Pleistocene. Australopithecines, Washburn concluded, w ­ ere more likely to have been the hunted than the hunters.38 Ardrey told the story of Dart’s treatment at the Livingstone meeting three times in African Genesis; more than any other single episode, Dart’s rejection t­here seems to have crystallized Ardrey’s negative opinion of professional science: “Murder had been done . . . ​at Livingstone,” Ardrey fumed.39 Nonetheless, the combination of the Livingstone meeting and Ardrey’s attention brought Dart some long-­awaited patronage. A wealthy American manufacturer of machine tools, Leighton Wilkie, pre­sent at Livingstone and as outraged as Ardrey at Dart’s treatment, wrote Dart a check for $3,000 on the spot so he could continue his excavations at Makapan.40 Ardrey’s Reporter article attracted the attention of the Smithsonian Institution, which requested from Dart a full account of his evidence for bone weapons and killer instincts.41 This article, in turn, brought Dart the opportunity to write Adventures with the Missing Link, his 1959 popu­lar autobiography (figure 3.1).42 Though he had begun to find some professional acclaim, Dart seems to have de­cided that the public would make a more receptive audience for his story than did scientists (figure 3.2).

Fomenting a Revolution By the time African Genesis appeared in 1961, Ardrey had embraced his life as an expatriate. He was living in Rome with his second wife, Berdine Grunewald, a white South African actress and a star of the Afrikaans theater. The two had met in Johannesburg, fallen madly in love, and w ­ ere wedded in Dart’s home. While Ardrey championed Dart’s cause in his 84

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3.1  In his 1959 autobiography, Raymond Dart is pictured using an ox’s

shoulder blade as a weapon to smash a pig skull.

writings, Grunewald made a second c­ areer as illustrator of her husband’s books. African Genesis contained dramatic descriptions of Ardrey’s own immersion in the world of physical anthropology, his interactions with Raymond Dart, Robert Broom, and Louis and Mary Leakey, and their profusion of fossil finds. The book also depicted the drama of life in the Pleistocene. Ardrey revealed that two dif­fer­ent species of Australopithecine had been discovered: Dart’s Australopithecus africanus, small, lithe, and delicate, and Broom’s Australopithecus robustus, heavier in bodily form and dentition. Africanus, adapted for life on the savannah, had been the meat-­eater, hunter, and killer, while robustus seemed clearly to have been a forest-­dwelling vegetarian. Which of ­these species had been the ­human ancestor? To solve the mystery of man’s origins, Ardrey ­imagined a ­battle for survival, of Biblical proportions, between t­hese two rival species. “When did they meet? We do not know. But somewhere,” he surmised, “­there should be a rec­ord of the meeting of b ­ rothers. ­There should be that moment, frozen in stone, when Cain met Abel, and slew him . . . ​and fathered the ­human race.” 43 Australopithecus africanus, more vulnerable in body, but arming himself with animal bones deliberately 85

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3.2  Dramatic depictions of the predatory be­hav­ior of Australopithecines—­

here shown wielding bone weapons—­adorned Dart’s popu­lar writings. From Dart, “The Ape Men Tool Makers of a Million Years Ago,” Illustrated London News, May 9, 1959, p. 800. Drawing by William Stanford. 86

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fashioned into killing implements, emerged as the victor. Dart’s claim that weapons created the h ­ uman species found a central place in a worldwide best seller. But African Genesis did not focus solely on South African paleoanthropology. Ardrey devoted the first half of the book to quite dif­fer­ent sciences entirely: ethology, zoology, and primatology. Drawing on the work of Konrad Lorenz, Elliot Howard, and Eugene Marais, Ardrey showed that evidence for a killer instinct existed in the animal world, too. In a highly original move, he identified the ethological evidence, and the evidence emerging from paleoanthropology, as two aspects of a single phenomenon. A new conception of instinct was poised to overhaul the natu­ral and social sciences, and Ardrey appointed himself as its public spokesman. The achievement of African Genesis was to become a point of contact between ethology and paleoanthropology, to bring together and pre­sent to a public readership t­ hese two wings of the con­temporary revolution in the sciences. According to Ardrey, the con­temporary revolution placed an instinct for aggression at the heart of animal and ­human nature. ­Whether it was a greylag gander turning his aggression outward to strengthen ties at home, or a protohuman hunting band sharing its kill and fighting off rival bands, the violent impulse had profound constructive effects. It was intimately connected to the drive to maintain and defend a territory and to the natu­ral propensity to find one’s place in a pecking hierarchy. Enmity ­toward the outgroup and amity ­toward t­hose within formed the very foundation of social order. As opposed to the instincts for food and sex, which preserved the individual, the instincts for aggression, territory, and order preserved the coherence and integrity of the group. T ­ hese w ­ ere social instincts, and Ardrey regarded them as even more fundamental than ­mother love. From this disposition of primal instincts, society was born. ­Because society welled up from ­these deep internal springs, it was fundamentally inalterable and not an invention or an imposition of culture. Nature laid down the basic pattern of ­human society: the tendencies for males to bond, to lead, to fight, to dominate females and to compete, to fear and hate outsiders. Although t­hese tendencies ­were deeply ingrained in all of nature, man—­“a predator whose natu­ral instinct is to kill with a weapon”—­had his own variation on them, his own “instinctual bundle” dictating ­human social arrangements. Should man be deprived of his weapons—­that key to humanity—­and no adequate substitute found, terrible disruption to ­human nature and society would result. Ardrey 87

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had seen it happen to a troop of wild rhesus macaques, captured and put on shipboard: without the “disciplines” of territory and social order, havoc ensued, and ­mothers fought their own infants for a scrap. “Without territory, t­ here was only terror.” 44 To try to train or command ­humans out of their own instinctual bundle would be just as dangerous and as futile. While upholding Dart’s basic point—­that humankind was born in vio­lence—­Ardrey left aside Dart’s more bloodthirsty language and graphic images: the “slaughter-­gutted archives” of ­human history, the “loathsome cruelty” of man to man. In so d ­ oing, the playwright transformed Australo­ pithecus into a tough and wily survivor, a worthy ancestor whose lifeways ­were the common heritage of all mankind. Although throughout African Genesis, Ardrey portrayed Africa as savage, primitive, and threatening—­“a sky swept savannah glowing with menace”—by the book’s last pages, he presented the land and its p ­ eople, both ancient and modern, as fundamentally familiar and related to himself and his readers. We w ­ ere all “­children of Cain,” Ardrey concluded: “His face is in yours and in mine and in the black man’s down the street.” 45 Descent from risen apes (not fallen angels) marked humankind as a unity. Ardrey was confident that the discovery of the aggression instinct and associated drives would revolutionize the ­human sciences. In psy­chol­ogy, sociology, and anthropology, he asserted, especially in the United States, “environmentalism” still dominated. Its premises held that ­human culture was unique and separate from the animal world; that experience and learning w ­ ere wholly determinative of be­hav­ior; and that ­human infants ­were born good and innocent, only to be corrupted l­ater once they ­were civilized. Such sentimental and fallacious beliefs had hardened into unquestioned dogma, enforcing hegemony and silencing dissenters. Ardrey portrayed environmentalism as the party line in academia, a brand of scientific McCarthyism that evoked his disgust. Even worse, he argued, the dogma was actually dangerous. With the atomic bomb poised to annihilate humanity, scientists and the public must no longer ignore or deny the facts that man was born with a weapon in his hand, and that his aggressive drive, buried deep in his nature, could never be eradicated. For readers shaken by the Cuban Missile Crisis of October  1962—­the closest that the United States and Soviet Union ever came to nuclear war—­this argument must have resonated. The killer instinct must be acknowledged and properly managed, or atomic cataclysm, only so narrowly averted, would be the certain result. 88

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Playwright among the Professionals Ardrey’s sojourn to Africa in the mid-1950s did not put a stop to his work as a dramatist. In the midst of his research for African Genesis, he temporarily abandoned the proj­ect and spent the winter of 1956–1957 in Vienna writing a play about the con­temporary Hungarian uprising. Shadow of Heroes opened in London in 1958 and New York in December 1961, a few weeks ­after African Genesis was published. The play dramatized the attempt of the Hungarian p ­ eople to establish their own in­de­pen­dent nation, only to be brutally crushed by the Soviet regime.46 The play failed to draw audiences; its substantive engagement with social and po­liti­cal issues had gone out of artistic fashion, Ardrey concluded, and it was his last contribution to the stage.47 But he continued to write screenplays for Hollywood movies into the 1960s, notably for The Four Horse­men of the Apocalypse (1962) and Khartoum (1966).48 While he was maintaining his connections to stage and screen, Ardrey was at the same time gaining a remarkable entry into the world of professional science. His association with Dart was only one part of it. Ardrey also gained the trust of the geologist, paleontologist, and physical anthropologist Kenneth Oakley, who regarded Dart’s case as unproven, but who hoped, according to Ardrey, that Ardrey himself would take it up and defend it.49 In some popu­lar forums, Ardrey was represented alongside the scientists, almost—­but not quite—as one of them. A Life magazine article from 1961 pictured Dart, Leakey, and Ardrey as three pioneers of African paleoanthropology.50 In 1971, the L.  S.  B. Leakey Foundation sponsored a public “dialogue” at Caltech between Leakey and Ardrey about aggression and vio­lence in man.51 In 1975 Lorenz remarked that Ardrey had become “a very good ethologist in his own right.”52 Such connections did not, however, lead Ardrey to harbor professional aspirations. On the contrary: in his scientific writings and appearances, Ardrey never pretended to be a scientist but made clear that his background was in an entirely dif­fer­ent line of work, and that when it came to the sciences he was therefore—in Lorenz’s sense of the term—an amateur. Ardrey’s amateur status became a key part of his authorial identity. In African Genesis, he presented himself as a “Broadway playwright and Hollywood script writer,” a dramatist and a generalist. In his books, each of which was subtitled “a personal investigation” or “a personal inquiry,” he stressed his ties to the theater and his general ignorance and incompetence in m ­ atters of science. The tactic prob­ably helped endear 89

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3.3  Robert Ardrey (left) and Louis Leakey (right) at their meeting at Caltech

in 1971. From “Aggression and Vio­lence in Man: A Dialogue between Dr. Louis Leakey and Mr. Robert Ardrey,” Munger Africana Library Notes 9 (November 1971), p. 25.

him to lay audiences, but it likely also smoothed his relationships with scientists. As a mere amateur, he deferred to the professionals. In the Caltech dialogue, Ardrey defused any potentially unpleasant disagreement between himself and Leakey by emphasizing his own status as an untrained outsider: “­Don’t pay any attention to me,” Ardrey said parenthetically at one point. “I change my mind all the time. He’s a professional, I’m an amateur. He ­can’t change his mind, but I can change my mind. That’s the nice ­thing about being an amateur.”53 (See figure 3.3.) In creating relationships with the other “wild men” of African science—­Dart, Broom, John Robinson—­Ardrey often emphasized his subservient status, portraying himself as one who has come to learn at the feet of the masters. The show of deference, however, was mainly a strategic ploy to gain access to the world of professional science. Once admitted, Ardrey sub90

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verted the status hierarchy and asserted his own kind of authority. As a playwright, he declared himself a specialist in nothing but ­human nature, and thus an expert in exactly the realm that the scientists w ­ ere entering. In this inverted view, his theatrical expertise became not a weakness but a strength, a qualification for understanding h ­ uman nature better even than the scientists could. Theatrical meta­phors and dramatic motifs filled the pages of African Genesis and helped Ardrey to frame and solve scientific prob­lems. He ­imagined the vexed question of h ­ uman origins in play form: the Australopithecine Cain and Abel w ­ ere “characters,” their encounter took place “on stage,” their Pleistocene setting was “the third act.” “And as the final curtain falls on the Pleistocene wilderness,” Ardrey wrote, “one character alone ­will occupy the stage to face the judgment of time and the audience.”54 He chose to illustrate African Genesis not with photo­graphs but with line drawings done by his wife to evoke a mood, much as a set designer would with scenery and props. In Berdine Ardrey’s portraits of ­animals and Australopithecines, subjects appeared as individuals or in groups of two or three, in solemn and dignified poses, gazing intently at the viewer as if waiting for some anticipated threat to materialize. Her sketches of bone weapons, African landscapes, and cultural artifacts expressed a similar sense of mystery and foreboding. Berdine’s artwork, Ardrey wrote to his editor at Atheneum, “extends the essentially poetic and imaginative approach to the material.”55 (See figure 3.4.) Ardrey’s turn to science writing changed his subject ­matter and method, but it did not fundamentally alter his métier. Ardrey’s imaginative approach—­a mode he associated with art, not with science—­went along with his f­ree use of intuition in reaching and accepting conclusions. In African Genesis, he described his realization of Dart’s argument for Australopithecine vio­lence occurring not by a chain of logical reasoning, but in a flash of insight. As he held the shattered jawbone, Ardrey tells us, “my discouragement fell away. My incompetence vanished. One needed nothing but the lay common sense of a juryman to return a verdict that at some terrible moment in most ancient times, murder had been done.”56 Notably, he identified such intuition with a lay­ man’s judgment. It was a kind of reasoning he shared with Dart.57 The anatomist also relied on his feeling—an aesthetic or empathetic appreciation—to consolidate his argument about the use of bones as weapons. The feel of the bone in his own hand—an intuition about how it must have been used—­was 91

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3.4  Berdine Ardrey’s drawings

from African Genesis and from Territorial Imperative: (a) A pensive Australopithecine

amid animal bones and skulls. (b) Australopithecus as juvenile

delinquent, an allusion to West Side Story. (c) A bone weapon fitting neatly

in the hand. (d) A Viet­nam­ese soldier.

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a major piece of Dart’s evidence. “The upper jaws of ungulates,” he wrote in 1953, “are usually broken off so that they fit nicely in one’s hand.”58 In his 1959 autobiography, Dart included photo­graphs of himself holding and wielding bone weapons. With no other hard evidence about how—if at all—­these bone fragments ­were used, Dart had to put himself in Australo­ pithecus’ position and hold the fragment the same way the protohuman must have. Likewise, when Ardrey held the damaged jawbone in his own hands, the truth of Dart’s proposition was borne in on him. For both men, the “feel” of the object in the hand sealed the issue. Dart’s critics homed in on his use of intuition in science, a mode of reasoning highly contested in physical anthropology in the ­middle de­ cades of the twentieth ­century. For Solly Zuckerman, the only way for physical anthropology to become truly scientific was through mathe­ matics and mea­sure­ment, not the kind of “divine guidance” that Zuckerman charged had led Dart’s Australopithecus discovery.59 Dart did in fact also use statistical evidence to demonstrate the predominance of certain types of fossil bone fragments in Australopithecine deposits, but his case for the “osteodontokeratic culture” necessarily relied on his empathy for and sense of kinship with t­ hese remote ancestors. For Ardrey, it was Dart’s intuition that persuaded. “You know,” he told Ashley Montagu, “I love Dart. . . . ​And I think the t­ hing I love about him most is that he’s a second-­rate scientist and a first-­rate artist. A truly top-­drawer, imperishable, from here-­to-­eternity artist.” 60 As an artist, an amateur, and a champion of intuitive, creative thinking, Ardrey insisted that the world of professional science should not monopolize the prob­lem of ­human nature.

“This Is Ardrey’s Science” African Genesis did not simply exemplify an alternative mode of reasoning in the sciences; it also presented a forceful critique of science, not just of the environmentalist dogma, but also of science more generally.61 At key moments in the book, Ardrey definitively traded the posture of the ­humble supplicant before the altar of science for that of the authoritative critic. In the opening pages, the playwright contrasted his own experience as an artist portraying ­human nature on stage and screen with that of professional scientists, whose “extreme” overspecialization forced them to confine their ideas to obscure, “inaccessible,” and “unreadable journals.” 62 Of course, by 1961, not only Dart but also Lorenz and Leakey had written popularizations, so their ideas can hardly be said to have been inaccessible. 93

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Ardrey’s word choice, however, shows that he meant “specialist” not simply as a term of description, but as an indictment: a sign that the scientist has shirked his responsibility to make his findings relevant to the public. At the root of ­every social prob­lem lay the puzzle of ­human nature. And a dramatist, a generalist, was much better suited than an overly specialized scientist to make the connections and argue for relevance. For such a socially relevant science, dramatists and generalists must be in charge, the public must be the judge, popularization must be its vehicle, and the elite scientists must take a back seat. Beginning with this critique of specialization, Ardrey moved on to a criticism of individual scientists. T ­ hose whom he identified as “environmentalists” w ­ ere his principal targets, and the more prestigious the scientist who upheld this fallacy, the sharper Ardrey’s barbs. The zoologist Sir Solly Zuckerman came in for par­tic­ul­ar invective. Ardrey portrayed Zuckerman as the prototypical elite establishment scientist, highly trained and world famous—­but by studying primates only at the London Zoo, Zuckerman came to the utterly wrongheaded conclusion that sex was the only t­ hing that mattered for primate society.63 In the cage, all the impor­tant social instincts that truly structured animal be­hav­ior in the wild (for territory, hierarchy, male bonding against an outgroup) ­were rendered invisible. Invisible, too, was the intimate relationship between ­these animal instincts and ­human society—­Zuckerman believed the latter was an invention of h ­ umans alone. For Ardrey nothing could be more fallacious. By contrast, the scientists whom Ardrey singled out for praise ­were generally self-­trained and without professional recognition. Eugene Marais, to whose memory African Genesis was dedicated, Ardrey depicted as a lonely Afrikaner naturalist, toiling in obscurity and rejected by his profession. In paying homage to his work, Ardrey noted that Marais was also a poet, ­lawyer, and journalist; most significantly, he was uncorrupted by the prestige-­making pro­cesses of professional science, and so could glimpse the truth about animal nature. The attention that scientists ­were fi­nally paying to territorial be­hav­ior, Ardrey asserted, “serves in many ways to confirm the clear eyesight of poets and peasants.” 64 Ardrey attacked the prestigious, but he did not refrain from criticizing even t­ hose scientists who w ­ ere his mentors—­Louis Leakey, Robert Broom, Kenneth Oakley.65 Even Raymond Dart came in for his share of rebuke. Ardrey lambasted Dart for the latter’s mishandling of the hyena controversy with the northern scientific establishment. Dart argued that 94

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Australopithecus had used bone weapons, but scientists from Zuckerman to Sherwood Washburn asserted instead that hyenas w ­ ere responsible for scavenging the animal bones associated with Australopithecine deposits. Dart’s argument against the “hyena alibi” was that hyenas never collect bones in this way. Ardrey recognized the weakness of this position—­one counterexample could destroy it—­and waded into the controversy himself. He presented twenty-­four lines of evidence, much of it original with him, focusing on several specific Australopithecine sites where the collections of animal bones could not have been made by hyenas.66 By intervening in a scientific debate involving some of the most celebrated scientists of the day and presenting evidence unknown even to t­ hose scientists, the layman had managed—­for the moment at least—to become the expert. Ardrey criticized the pro­cesses of reward and the construction of authority in professional science, whereby certain individuals w ­ ere revered and o ­ thers ­were marginalized. This idol worship was allowed to proceed to such an extent that mainstream beliefs became unquestioned “orthodoxy.” By Ardrey’s estimation, the more untrained the observers, and the closer to the humanities, the better their intuitive grasp of the findings and implications of a new science of h ­ uman nature. So “poets and peasants” knew ­these truths better than professional scientists. “Hollywood knows more about the inner nature of Homo sapiens,” Ardrey declared, “than any po­liti­cal, philosophical, or scientific school on earth.” West Side Story, the musical that premiered in 1957, offered “a vivid portrait of the natu­ral man.” 67 Similarly, in Ardrey’s Shadow of Heroes, the Hungarian revolutionaries of 1956 w ­ ere represented as d ­ ying not simply for justice or for democracy, but for Hungary: a young p ­ eople possessed by the territorial instinct. Art had apprehended a truth that science was only belatedly discovering. In making this argument against professional narrowness, and in presenting the artist and the generalist as the proper authorities on ­human nature, Ardrey was taking a stance in a broader ongoing debate about the relative worth of science and the humanities. The intellectual and moral status of the specialist was very much at stake in this debate. In 1959, C. P. Snow had asserted that the divide between science and the humanities had become so wide as to be nearly unbridgeable; the “two cultures” stared at each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. Snow excoriated literary intellectuals as “natu­ral Luddites,” while scientists had “the ­future in their bones.” The industrialization of society that scientists and engineers brought about was “the only hope of the poor,” Snow a­ rgued, 95

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while the humanists showed ­little appreciation and less understanding of the fact that applied science made their lives pos­si­ble.68 For Snow, science had the moral edge. Against ­these charges, Robert Maynard Hutchins defended the humanists, while also decrying the science-­humanities divide. Hutchins had been president of the University of Chicago when Ardrey was a student ­there, and his views on democracy, ­free speech, and the value of the liberal arts had considerable influence on Ardrey.69 “I wish at the outset to repudiate C. P. Snow,” Hutchins wrote in 1963, “who intimates . . . ​that scientists should be entrusted with the world ­because they are a ­little bit better than other p ­ eople.”70 On the contrary, scientists w ­ ere actually both intellectually and morally impoverished; ­limited in education, obsessed with facts but ignorant of ideas, scientists ­were hardly the natu­ral leaders Snow had envisioned. For Hutchins, specialization was at the root of the scientist’s prob­lems: “The narrower the field in which a man must tell the truth, the wider is the area in which he is f­ ree to lie. This,” Hutchins sarcastically declared, “is one of the advantages of specialization.”71 In the two cultures debate, Ardrey unswervingly took Hutchins’ side. Specialization was corrupting, preventing the leaders of the con­ temporary revolution in the ­human sciences from making their conclusions available and understandable to society. The “censorship of scientific orthodoxy” had shut down honest discussion of the findings of paleoanthropology and ethology.72 Only humanists and generalists ­were truly suited to elucidate the h ­ uman value of t­ hese sciences. For Ardrey, the democ­ratization of science was the antidote to specialization: science had to be made accessible, applicable, and placed in the public’s possession and control—in all meanings of the word, pop­ul­ ar­ized. Just as his plays had celebrated the rebellion of the p ­ eople against their elitist oppressors, Ardrey’s popu­lar science books sought to break the stranglehold of professional specialization. African Genesis was both an exploration of a new view of h ­ uman nature and an experiment in testing the bound­aries of scientific authority. Ardrey’s challenge to professional science appeared consistently in his unpublished correspondence in the months preceding and following the publication of African Genesis in November 1961. His iconoclasm created some practical prob­lems when it came to recommending expert readers to provide endorsements for the marketing of the book. Advising Simon Michael Bessie, his editor at Atheneum Publishers, Ardrey wrote in January 1961: “The basic prob­lem of scientific authority is that ­there 96

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a­ ren’t any—­not on all phases of the book. The zoologists know nothing of paleontology, the paleontologists know nothing of African paleontology, ­etc. AVOID ANTHROPOLOGISTS. This is a pseudo-­science, loaded to the Plimsoll mark with pseudo-­authorities.” He continued: “I am writing a revolutionary and controversial book on the total subject ­matter of which I am the only living authority.” For Ardrey, scientists ­were not the proper judges of his work: “It ­won’t be a ­matter of any detail that determines the fate of this book in the hands of scientists. It’ll be a m ­ atter of ­will,” he assured his editor. “It’s why I think the book’s fate w ­ ill be determined not by scientists but by men like [Adlai Stevenson]. . . . ​Stevenson was bug-­ eyed, by the way, when I described it to him a year ago.”73 A few months ­later he again wrote Bessie: “We need the opinions of the Niehburs and the Lipp­manns, of Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchens [sic]. . . . ​It is among ­these ­people that I ­shall find my true territorial defenders. They require a minimum of scientific assurance—­simply assurance that they are not being had by a crackpot or a charlatan.”74 Ironically, the audience that Ardrey envisioned h ­ ere for the new science of aggression was a group arguably just as elite as the scientists he sought to displace—­hardly the “poets and peasants” he had been celebrating. Having called for a radically dif­fer­ent demo­cratic science, Ardrey was ultimately unable or unwilling actually to imagine “the p ­ eople” in charge. Following the book’s publication, Ardrey crowed to his editor, “A most extraordinary ­thing has happened in the last six months. A layman named Ardrey has challenged the findings of science and the fundamental world presumptions concerning the nature of man—­and has quite a fair chance of leaving his opponents deader than a beach full of stranded herrings. . . . ​I realize that this fucking layman named Ardrey—­as of this moment—­has the ­whole bloody field on the run.”75 If this had all been self-­serving bravado and dismissed at the time as such, we could safely ignore it. But, surprisingly, it ­wasn’t dismissed; Ardrey’s critique evidently touched a nerve. Among Ardrey’s readers, many noted, and some delighted in, Ardrey’s indictment of science as a private club. The zoologist Marston Bates wondered who would know more than a dramatist about ­human nature.76 The zoologist Arthur Jones wrote that Ardrey’s imputation of “bias and blindness” to ­today’s leading scientists was “painful b ­ ecause partially true.”77 The social anthropologist Jack Goody remarked that Ardrey opened up the recondite world of science “immeasurably more vividly” than the “pallid popularizations” of academics.78 Even t­ hose reviewers who panned the book responded to 97

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Ardrey’s critique of scientific authority. The nature writer Sally Carrighar, for example, chastised Ardrey for not being sufficiently scientific and referred to him repeatedly as “the script-­writer” and as a “latter day Cecil B. DeMille [who has] written the script for a super spectacular.”79 A key point of her prominent review was a challenge to Ardrey’s construction of the scientific landscape: Carrighar hotly denied that the new science of h ­ uman nature had been hidden away in specialized journals. Eric Sevareid, the CBS tele­vi­sion commentator, defended the playwright’s claims to expertise. “­Those inclined to dismiss Mr. Ardrey in advance on the grounds that he is a dramatist by training, not a scientist, ­will cheat themselves. . . . ​African Genesis is solid enough to stand or fall by its own weight, . . . ​so much so that Mr. Ardrey’s scientific credentials, or lack thereof, ­ought not to be part of the fierce argument the book should arouse.”80Ardrey reported Sevareid’s private response: “We w ­ ere talking about the prob­lem of scientists,” Ardrey wrote, “and Sevareid said, ‘Do you know, it’s strange, but I’m not even interested in what the scientists say. I believe e­ very word of it. I believe it out of my own insights and experience. It just c­ ouldn’t be untrue.’ ”81 Professional expertise was no match for layman’s intuition, and if the scientists failed to grasp the ­human meaning of their work, it was up to the amateurs to step into the breach.82

The Magnetism of Territory Five years l­ ater, Ardrey’s next popu­lar book, The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations, took up where African Genesis had left off. If anything, Ardrey’s sense of imminent doom had intensified from the ­earlier book. The Territorial Im­ perative invoked a terrifying image: a ticking time bomb, and an atomic one at that, threatened ­human civilization, and mutually assured destruction was one button press away. If weapons created man, what would happen now that man had the ultimate weapon? “You and I know that we live in years of strange grace,” Ardrey wrote. “It is a time of peace enforced by terror . . . ​when the wheel stops and the ball falls on double zero,” an apt meta­phor for a chance-­dependent apocalypse. Facing “Judgment Day,” our only hope, Ardrey believed, lay in the new biological knowledge of ­human beings as animals.83 While African Genesis had explored ancestral vio­lence and its legacy for humanity, the new book focused on one type of aggression: territorial 98

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defense. Borrowing a theme from Lorenzian ethology, Ardrey examined how the proper disposal of instinctual energies prevented outright killing. For Ardrey, territory was the gauge through which instinctual pressures could be relieved, and its laws, as valid in the animal world as for ­humans, had to be understood and obeyed in order for catastrophe to be averted. Territorial Imperative appeared in summer 1966, within months of Lorenz’s On Aggression, and Ardrey used his book to announce and prepare readers for Lorenz’s work. Thanks to the coincidence, Ter­ ritorial Imperative became an even bigger bestseller than African Genesis had been.84 As he had maintained in the ­earlier book, Ardrey ­here too asserted that the drive to maintain a territory—an exclusive preserve of one’s own—­was an instinct in both animals and man. Claiming a territory engendered a certain energy in its possessor and boosted his confidence, power, and attractiveness. The proprietor had the psychological edge—­the home court advantage—­and usually successfully resisted invasions. Territory was a male game: males competed for territory, never for females, and only a propertied male could attract a female and raise a brood. The private territory of a breeding c­ ouple forged their link, enhanced their bond, and ensured that they cared for their offspring. In tying an individual to his mate and his f­ amily, the territorial imperative reminded him of his responsibilities to ­those beyond himself: it was the source of altruism, the devotion to something greater than self, the guide to “biological morality.”85 Disciplined by the rules of territory, animal aggressiveness was turned ­toward positive and constructive ends. But for territory to fulfill its creative functions it demanded an outsider, an other, an object beyond its bound­aries against which aggression could be directed. Just as Lorenz’s fighting fish had demonstrated, for love to exist and society to thrive t­ here must be something to oppose: e­ ither an ­actual opponent or some natu­ral threat like the weather. Ardrey summed up the requirement in a neat equation: “Amity [A] = Enmity [E] + ­hazard.” For man, who had conquered his natu­ral environment and who had no natu­ral predators, h ­ azard had come largely u ­ nder control. According to the equation’s relentless logic, the demand for enmity must then loom larger in the production of amity. Love required hate: it needed an ­enemy. “It is E—­enmity, hostility, antagonism, aggression . . . ​that is the major ingredient in amity’s making,” Ardrey assured his readers.86 From pair-­bond love to collegial or patriotic fellow feeling, amity directed inward thrived on antagonism and aggression directed outward. 99

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Ardrey’s evidence for his equation ranged widely over animal species, and he moved as easily from animal society to h ­ uman morality. Defining the “nation” as “a social group containing at least two mature males which holds as an exclusive possession a continuous area of space,” Ardrey asserted, “it does not ­matter too much ­whether we are considering the true lemur, the howling monkey, the smooth-­billed ani, the Bushman band, the Greek city-­state, or the United States of Amer­i­ca. The social princi­ple remains the same.”87 Ardrey read global politics through the lens of territory. Soviet agriculture had failed, he argued, b ­ ecause Stalin implemented collective farming, denying the p ­ eople possession of their own land and sapping t­ hose innate, mysterious sources of energy and resolve that ­were fed by having a territory of one’s own. ­Human nature, not the Rus­sian permafrost or the embrace of Lysenko, turned out to be Stalin’s undoing, Ardrey believed, and the Soviet experiment “found itself at the mercy of an evolutionary fact.” The logic of territory likewise explained the American response to Pearl Harbor; Ardrey recalled his own welling up of patriotic pride when he heard news of the bombing. Territorial ­possession marked the difference between the meek Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jew—­the Jew of the gas chambers (“deterritorialized man”)—­and the confident, “barrel-­chested” Israeli.88 The territorial imperative predicted the American defeat in the Vietnam War and the failure of sanctions against South Africa: in both cases, an intervention from without could serve only to shore up and strengthen the defenses of the territorial possessor. Collective failure to appreciate the power of the territorial imperative was at the root of ­these war­time and Cold War follies.89 Although he endorsed Lorenz’s and Storr’s recommendations to sublimate aggression in sports and the space race, Ardrey spent ­little time on ­actual policy prescriptions.90 Instead, the book presented a general moral and po­liti­cal lesson. The new sciences of ethology and paleoanthropology had shown that h ­ uman nature was not a blank slate, but structured and programmed by a bundle of ancient and power­ful instincts. ­These instincts set limits to what h ­ uman beings could be made to do and constrained the po­liti­cal systems within which they lived: ­humans could not simply be engineered to fit a ruler’s whim. If it ­were the case that ­humans lacked instincts, they would be susceptible to total control, or the attempt at it. If ­human beings ­were “blank slates,” ­human be­hav­ior would be infinitely malleable by environmental conditioning—­“a most modest blackboard” on which any socialist or fascist dictator “may write his name.”91 But b ­ ecause man’s be­hav­ior welled up from instinctual sources, 100

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the resilience and autonomy of his nature would always thwart attempts to tame it. “The territorial nature of man is ge­ne­tic and ineradicable,” Ardrey wrote. “We did not invent it. We cannot command it. Nor can we, with all our policemen, permanently deny it.”92 H ­ uman be­hav­ior could be molded only so far: if pushed beyond its inborn limits, it would spring back to its natu­ral shape like an overstretched rubber band. As he put it in a letter to Ashley Montagu, “To me man loses all dignity if he is a vulnerable material subject to endless manipulation. To me his dignity rests on the three billion years of evolution that brought us forth. To me the iron of man lies in his natu­ral history—an iron malleable, yes—­but still iron.”93 At last Ardrey had found the answer to the prob­lem that had driven him from Hollywood. Inborn biology stood as the final bulwark against totalitarian conditioning, ­human nature the ultimate roadblock to oppressive authority and to assaults from right or left. In the 1940s, liberalism had crumpled before McCarthyism precisely ­because it had lacked such a defense. In the sciences of instinct, Ardrey found a secure and unshakeable foundation for a belief in individual rights and liberties. In The Territorial Imperative, Ardrey made clear what t­hose individual rights ­were for: to possess and own private property—­a territory. Cap­i­tal­ist democracy was the only system of government that both acknowledged man as f­ ree and active moral agent and accommodated his inborn drive to assert private owner­ship. Marxist socialism, by contrast, which Ardrey took to be the most extreme form of social control, was out of keeping with h ­ uman nature ­because it denied this basic ­human need. The argument for the killer instinct—­affinity for weapons, territorial defense, and the social organ­ization ­these produced—­became an argument specifically for capitalism and against communism.94 The socioeconomic order Ardrey deemed most “natu­ral” was the one that resembled most closely the mid-­twentieth-­century American way of life. For a dedicated expatriate, it was a surprising conclusion.

Man the Killer The year 1966 marks the moment that the killer instinct went mainstream. Not only was it the subject of Ardrey’s and Lorenz’s best sellers; it also entered the lexicon of well-­known and respected scientists. In April of that year, with the support of the Wenner-­Gren Foundation, a symposium was convened at the University of Chicago on the theme of “Man the 101

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Hunter.” Symposium participants, an international array of anthropologists, biologists, and archaeologists, echoed Lorenzian and Ardreyan ideas about innate aggression, though without always crediting t­ hese pop ethological sources. While distancing themselves from Ardrey’s “sensational claims” about territory, the scientists nevertheless sounded very much like him.95 As David Hamburg, the Stanford psychiatrist, explained, the symposium’s operating assumption was that ­because hunting and gathering represented such a long stage of the h ­ uman past, during which “impor­ tant adaptive characteristics of Homo sapiens evolved, . . . ​much of the ge­ ne­tic equipment of con­temporary man is likely to have been ­shaped by the selective pressures” of that era.96 Discussion of ethnographic fieldwork on con­temporary hunter-­gatherer ­peoples (believed to be on the verge of extinction) occupied the first half of the meeting; in the second half, the scientists turned to the relevance of the ethnography for the reconstruction of ­human evolution. In their contribution to the symposium volume, the anthropologists Sherwood Washburn and C. S. Lancaster put forward a conception of ­human nature strikingly similar to Dart’s and Ardrey’s. Once skeptical of Dart’s results, Washburn now seemed thoroughly convinced that the hunting adaptation reached deep into protohuman ancestry and that its inbuilt be­hav­iors structured the ­human way of life. “In a very real sense,” Washburn and Lancaster wrote, “our intellect, interests, emotions, and basic social life—­all are evolutionary products of the success of the hunting adaptation.”97 All of the ancestral species of Homo had been hunters, and even Australopithecus—­whom Washburn had once considered to be prey, not predator—­“was already a hunter, although possibly much less efficient than the ­later forms.”98 Like Dart and Ardrey, though without citing ­either, Washburn and Lancaster argued that the hunting adaptation produced certain h ­ uman behavioral patterns: male-­male bonding, for example, sprang from “the necessities of cooperation in hunting, butchering, and war,” as did an intensified sexual division of ­labor, in which females gathered fruits and vegetables and cared for the young.99 Washburn and Lancaster treated hunting and warfare as interchangeable activities for the hominids, and thus also for modern man. Men “enjoy hunting and killing,” they wrote, “and t­ hese activities are continued as sports even when they are no longer eco­nom­ically necessary.” Hunting became coextensive with killing, and tool synonymous with weapon. Sounding much like Lorenz—­and h ­ ere they did in fact cite him—­ 102

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Washburn and Lancaster observed that “many p ­ eople dislike the notion that man is naturally aggressive and that he naturally enjoys the destruction of other creatures.” But, they argued, such a sentimental view was totally unsupported by scientific evidence: “War has been far too impor­ tant in ­human history for it to be other than pleas­ur­able for the males involved,” and ­human killing was distinguished from that of other carnivores by its lack of “biological controls”—­submission gestures. “The extent to which the biological bases for killing have been incorporated into h ­ uman psy­chol­ogy may be mea­sured by the ease with which boys can be interested in hunting, fishing, fighting, and games of war.”100 Not every­one, of course, was persuaded. The anthropologist Colin Turnbull said that he was “both­ered by the assumption that all hunters are aggressive,” noting that his experience with the Bushmen and the Hadza demonstrated other­wise. “I am also not convinced,” he added, “that hunting is itself an aggressive activity.” The anthropologist David Schneider objected that even what constituted “hunting” could not be unambiguously defined: “It is not yet at all clear that hunting is such a distinctive and clearly definable way of life.”101 But ­these ­were minority voices. If the symposium was any indication, by the mid-1960s a consensus had formed: that h ­ uman ancestors had been not just hunters but also killers of their own kind; that the affinity for weapons reached into the dim recesses of the protohuman past; and that ­these specifically male traits had not only driven h ­ uman evolution, but also persisted to shape ­human be­hav­ior and ways of life in the pre­sent day. An equation between aggression, competitiveness, the love of war, and masculinity had gained prominence and credibility. In addition to its appearance in scientific forums, the killer instinct attained a level of cultural visibility in the 1960s higher than any it enjoyed before or since. The claim for innate aggression achieved a kind of commonsense status; it became the conventional wisdom of the era. That the appearances of the claim echoed pop ethological themes without always directly citing Lorenz or Ardrey shows that ­these writers gave voice to a broad consensus as much as they helped to create it. The claim for a killer instinct entered the policy arena with the psychologist Charles Osgood, a con­sul­tant to President John F. Kennedy on arms control and proponent of “conflict resolution.” Osgood recommended that something he called the “Neanderthal mentality” be taken into consideration in formulating nuclear deterrence strategy. “The truth of the ­matter is that we are caught in a g­ reat cultural lag,” Osgood ­asserted. 103

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“Our fa­cil­i­ty with technology has completely outstripped our ability to understand and control ourselves.”102 Without referring to Lorenz or Ardrey, Osgood upheld their contention that innate aggression and man’s affinity for weapons evolved ­under circumstances totally unlike ­those it faced in the Cold War era and that such instinctive emotional reactions had to be accommodated in any attempt at de-­escalation. Tele­vi­sion and film also absorbed the idea that the killer instinct was an indelible aspect of humanity. In a 1966 episode of Star Trek titled “The ­Enemy Within,” a transporter malfunction created a duplicate of Captain Kirk who, in contrast to the original, acted like a “thoughtless, brutal animal,” assaulting crewmembers and asserting total control. While the original Kirk kept the captain’s good tendencies ­toward love, compassion, and tenderness, the duplicate represented his evil side—­all hostility, lust, and vio­lence. Crucially, however, Kirk discovered that the longer he was separated from his evil twin, the less able he was to make a decision or issue a command. “It is his negative side which makes him strong,” Spock explained. “His evil side, properly controlled and disciplined, is vital to his strength.” Without his negative side, Kirk’s power of leadership eluded him. “I have to take him back into myself,” Kirk mused. And, once he did, “I’ve seen a part of myself no man should ever see.”103 Although Star Trek did not have any explicit links to Lorenz or Ardrey, the episode invoked the notion of a “so-­called evil”—­that aggression, when managed and channeled, was necessary, power­ful, and constructive. Pop ethology featured in perhaps the most famous scene in American cinematic history, and h ­ ere the connection to Ardrey was direct. The 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey opened with a sequence inspired by Af­ rican Genesis. Arthur C. Clarke, the screenwriter for Stanley Kubrick’s film, had read Ardrey’s book, and Clarke’s “Dawn of Man” sequence ­adopted Ardrey’s premise. The scene depicted a ­battle between two rival groups of ape-­men, one unarmed, the other armed with bone weapons—­the confrontation on the silver screen of Ardrey’s Abel and Cain.104 The armed group emerged victorious, and as its triumphant leader tossed his weapon into the air, the bone transformed into a spaceship gliding through darkness. The scene realized Ardrey’s and Dart’s contention: ­human ingenuity began in vio­lence. That Ardrey’s science writing should eventuate, appropriately, in a screenplay, brings his story full circle. Like Lorenz, Ardrey invested his pronouncements with popu­lar appeal. Ardrey stressed his layman’s status, flattening and even reversing hierarchies of knowledge and presenting a demo­cratic vision of science. 104

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Ardrey used ethology to explain current events and recent history, aiming to create a shock of recognition in his readers, a sense that, as Sevareid put it, t­ hese claims “just c­ ouldn’t be untrue.” Ardrey relied on an ancient and familiar literary motif: that man’s fatal flaw—­his killer instinct—­was also his greatest strength, deprived of which he would cease to be h ­ uman. Deploying such strategies of pre­sen­ta­tion, Ardrey’s books became especially efficient vehicles for the dispersion of pop ethology throughout American culture.

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CHAPTER FOUR

The Biology of Love To love thy neighbor as thyself is not simply good text material for Sunday morning sermons but perfectly sound biology. —­Ashley Montagu, On Being ­Human

W

hile the aggression instinct was forming in the minds and writings of its advocates, its mirror image, the cooperative drive, was making its debut on the world’s stage. In December 1949, UNESCO summoned an elite international committee of social scientists to its central office in Paris to address the vexed scientific and social prob­lem of race.1 The war recently ended had fed on the pernicious myth of “master” and “inferior” races. In order to help create a peaceful postwar world order, the scientists w ­ ere tasked with clarifying, once and for all, what “race” r­ eally meant. UNESCO’s elegant building on the Ave­nue Kléber, one of twelve branching out from the Arc de Triomphe, had served as Nazi headquarters just five years ­earlier during the occupation of Paris. Only Auschwitz could have been a more significant setting for the committee’s deliberations. Among the scientists who answered UNESCO’s call was the English-­ born American anthropologist Ashley Montagu, well known by the 1940s as an out­spoken critic of the race concept. Over the course of three days, as the committee of “experts in race prob­lems” conceived and drafted its Statement on Race, Montagu served as “rapporteur,” infusing the Statement with many of his key ideas. Seven months a­ fter the Paris meeting, on July 18, 1950, UNESCO made the Statement on Race public.2 In twenty-­one compact paragraphs, the committee put forward its vision of a postracial f­ uture. Race, the Statement said, was not a biological fact but a social myth. Its popu­lar meaning—­a group of p ­ eople with certain ­mental, moral, or emotional characteristics—­entirely lacked scientific validity. Properly defined, “race” could refer only to a ­human 106

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population that possessed certain gene frequencies as a result of a history of inbreeding. As breeding patterns changed, racial classifications would also change: “race” was not a static entity. Moreover, the genes that distinguished one breeding population from another correlated only with physical traits. A ­people’s perceived cultural characteristics had nothing to do with their genes but w ­ ere m ­ atters of tradition, teaching, and experience. At Montagu’s urging, the committee recommended avoiding confusion by dropping the term “race” altogether and replacing it with “ethnic group” instead. ­Human unity was the Statement’s leitmotif. ­Because mankind was one species derived from a common stock, ­humans had much more in common with each other than they had differences. Such unity was bound to increase over time, the Statement emphasized, b ­ ecause of the “co­ operative spirit,” which was “natu­ral to man” and “more deeply rooted than any self-­seeking tendencies.” In its stirring culmination—of which Montagu was the chief architect—­the Statement proclaimed, “Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood; for man is born with drives t­ oward cooperation, and u ­ nless ­those drives are satisfied, men and nations alike fall ill.”3 Intended to put an end to disagreement and discord, the Statement on Race instead became a target of criticism. The very next year, 1951, UNESCO issued a revised and more conservative statement, drawn up by a dif­fer­ent group of experts, retracting the idea that race was a social myth and softening the assertion that its conventional meanings had no scientific value.4 Montagu was the only holdover from the original committee, but his was now a minority view. His claim for natu­ral cooperation was a par­tic­ul­ar flashpoint, and it was conspicuously absent from the revised statement. Yet Montagu himself never abandoned the claim. Instead, he developed its implications: not only cooperation, he argued, but sociality and solidarity, altruism, and even love itself, w ­ ere inbuilt in ­human nature. Over the course of Montagu’s long and multifaceted c­ areer, he clung to a belief that h ­ uman beings ­were biologically determined to give and receive love. However embattled his position, Montagu was not alone in maintaining it. His dedication to the claim for natu­ral cooperation, and his conviction that its enactment was what the world desperately needed, led him to seek an alliance with the Russian-­born American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who similarly trusted in the power of love to redeem and regenerate humanity. Montagu and Sorokin approached the claim for 107

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natu­ral cooperation from dif­fer­ent directions: Montagu through a scientific and personal concern with the concept of race and an encounter with a group of pacifist biologists; Sorokin through his experience of the Rus­ sian Revolution, which led him to a Christianity-­inflected belief in nonviolent re­sis­tance to evil. But both men felt that the wars and disasters of the twentieth ­century had catalyzed a crisis of moral and ethical relativism in which absolute standards of right and wrong had been smashed. Both men believed that the answer to this corrosive relativism was a belief in ­human nature as a universal truth, cross-­culturally valid precisely ­because it was biologically rooted and hardwired for cooperation, altruism, and love. And both men believed that the scientific study of ­human goodness, in all its manifestations, provided a prescription for moral and ethical development. The paths of ­these two men crossed at the Research Center in Altruistic Integration and Creativity, the institution that Sorokin established at Harvard University in 1949. For Sorokin, the center represented an alternative to mainstream social science, a place where love was taken seriously as an object of scientific study. For Montagu, the center offered a refuge from his own po­liti­cally fraught and tenuous position in academia. For five years in the early 1950s the two men collaborated, then, for practical reasons, their ways parted. Deepening his popu­lar media presence, Montagu sought broader audiences for his gospel of love, while Sorokin dreamed of building even more ambitious institutions on the outskirts of academia dedicated to studying altruism. Their lives, two threads of dif­ fer­ent origins, converged at midcentury into a tightly interwoven skein of shared beliefs and mutual admiration, then diverged and separated again. Their collaboration is the story of how some social scientists, faced by world crisis at midcentury, made a decisive turn t­ oward biology.

Montagu’s Campaign against Racism Montagu came to “biological determinism”—­the phrase he used to describe his views—by an unlikely route. He was trained in cultural anthropology to uphold the supremacy of culture and specifically to reject biology as the shaper of h ­ uman be­hav­ior. Montagu remained true to the culturalist standpoint throughout his ­career, but not to the claim that ­human nature is a blank slate. Rather, once he ­adopted the notion of biologically grounded drives, he combined it with the anthropologist’s belief in ­human behavioral plasticity and flexibility. 108

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His identity was as carefully constructed as his view of ­human nature. “Ashley Montagu” was born Israel Ehrenberg in 1905, the only child of recent Rus­sian immigrants to the Jewish ghetto of London’s East End. In the year of his birth, the British Parliament passed the Aliens Act to restrict the flow of Jewish refugees to Britain, and anti-­Semitism was rife in his upbringing.5 To conceal his Jewishness, young Ehrenberg changed his name, adopting names with a patrician ring from literary figures he admired.6 As a teenager he sought out the intellectual companionship of Sir Arthur Keith, anatomist at the Royal College of Surgeons, on whose doorstep he appeared one day carry­ing an ancient skull dredged from the Thames. Although Keith and Montagu became lifelong friends, the young man never shared his mentor’s convictions that the races had diverged early in h ­ uman evolution and that “race war” was the principal mode of evolutionary pro­gress.7 In 1922, Montagu enrolled in University College, London, where he studied psy­chol­ogy, anatomy, sociology, logic, and the history of science; he was also Bronislaw Malinowski’s first student in social anthropology at the London School of Economics. Montagu left ­England for the United States in 1927, returned to London to serve as curator at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, and then immigrated for good in 1930 to New York City, where he got a job teaching anatomy at New York University Dental School. In 1934 he entered the gradu­ate program in cultural anthropology at Columbia University, studying with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, and earned his PhD in 1937 with a dissertation on the procreative beliefs of the Australian aborigines.8 In 1938 Montagu became associate professor of anatomy at Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia, but longed to be a member of a department of anthropology.9 By the late 1930s, Montagu was already an out­spoken critic of the race concept, urging the American Association of Physical Anthropologists to pass a resolution condemning discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or language.10 Soon he was making t­ hese views public. In a 1940 article, “The Socio-­Biology of Man,” Montagu presented an egalitarian and culturally relativist view of humanity. Echoing his anthropology teachers Boas and Benedict, Montagu argued that plasticity and educability w ­ ere the hallmarks of the ­human condition; that race could refer only to the superficial physical differences between ­peoples; and that such physical differences w ­ ere in no way connected to ­mental, temperamental, or moral differences. If given the same environment and the same advantages, all p ­ eople would develop to the same level of ability. Asserting that 109

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schoolchildren are taught physical relativity, but not “cultural relativity,” Montagu defined the latter precept to mean “that all cultures must be judged in relation to their own history . . . ​and definitely not by the arbitrary standard of any single culture such, for example, as our own.”11 Similarly, in 1942, Montagu wrote “The Nature of War and the Myth of Nature,” which expressed his cultural relativism at its fullest. H ­ ere he rebutted Arthur Keith’s claims that war, especially war driven by racial hatred, was “natu­ral.” According to Keith’s biological justification, “Nature keeps her orchard healthy by pruning, and war is her pruning hook.” But what was this “Nature,” Montagu scathingly retorted, Nature with a capital N? It was nothing but a myth, an in­ven­ted vital force, or another name for God.12 War arose “not as a result of natu­ral or biological conditions, but from purely artificial social conditions,” usually from economic injustice. And race prejudice, far from being instinctive, was a culturally endowed and relatively recent h ­ uman acquisition. In fact, Montagu concluded, “­there is no instinct ­toward peace in man just as ­there is none ­toward war.”13 But Montagu’s devotion to a purely cultural relativist stance was not to last. In the early 1940s he encountered a group of American scientists called the “peace biologists” whose writings made a decisive impact on his thinking. They convinced him that t­ here ­were actually biological tendencies in nature ­toward cooperation—­tendencies that ­were evident in ­human nature as well.

The Peace Biologists, the Crisis of Ethics, and the Moral Authority of Nature The peace biologists with whom Montagu cast his lot represented a venerable tradition in American biology.14 Drawing from the disciplines of embryology, physiology, and ecol­ogy, biologists like William Ritter, David Starr Jordan, Edwin Grant Conklin, and William Patten depicted evolution as “a creative pro­cess of cooperation and mutual ser­vice.”15 During World War I they opposed German militarism and the backing it received from a hypercompetitive but wrongheaded version of Darwinian natu­ral se­lection. For ­these biologists, nature meant community and cooperative association and provided no justification whatsoever for war.16 The advocates of natu­ral cooperation took their cue, in turn, from a work called Mutual Aid, by the Rus­sian geographer and zoologist, anarchist, and former prince Peter Kropotkin.17 While traveling through 110

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Siberia and Manchuria in the late nineteenth ­century observing animal life, Kropotkin had expected to find nature red in tooth and claw: a pitiless strug­gle between members of the same species for the means of existence. But quite the opposite situation surprised him. In t­ hese harsh climates, animals banded together, helping each other—to share food, ward off a predator, help a conspecific in danger—­rather than competing with each other. “I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support,” Kropotkin wrote, “carried on to such an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of the species, and its further evolution.”18 In a book that was as much ethnographic and so­cio­log­i­cal as zoological, Kropotkin extended the sociability princi­ple from insects and birds to quadrupeds and ­humans. Several chapters traced the practice of mutual aid from the “savage tribes” and “barbarian clans” of ancient and prehistoric eras up to medieval village communities and the guilds and trade ­unions of the nineteenth ­century. For Kropotkin, the social impulse was distinct from love or personal sympathy: it was not love that made a man rush into a burning building to save a trapped child, but a feeling even more power­ful and more basic. Moreover, the practice of mutual aid set the conditions for further pro­gress, w ­ hether evolutionary or social; animal species that lived in harmony ­were invariably the most numerous and prosperous, while peaceful h ­ uman communities fostered artists, inventors, and thinkers. Kropotkin credited Darwin, who had claimed in The Descent of Man that “ ‘­those communities . . . ​which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.’ ”19 The social Darwinists, Kropotkin believed, who stressed strug­gle, mistook Darwin’s true meaning: cooperation had mattered more to him than competition. Even Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s ­great defender, was wrong to have walled off the ­human garden from what he had portrayed as the surrounding ruthless forces of wild nature. Kropotkin healed Huxley’s rift by proclaiming that nature was now the model for ­human society. Derived from what he took to be the true, au­then­tic state of nature and of man, mutual aid was for Kropotkin an ethical princi­ple. In the context of World War II, the argument that nature could and should guide ethical conduct gained even greater urgency. A crisis of ethics loomed: the Nazis had in­ven­ted a new standard of be­hav­ior, a perverted value system all their own, and the prob­lem now became how to prove that system wrong, not simply to assert its wrongness or disagree 111

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with it. For this task, cultural relativism, the accustomed tool of the social sciences, was entirely unsuited. Nazi values could not simply be considered just another culture, a self-­consistent ­whole to be judged only by its own standards. Some absolute standard, by which to hold that distorted culture accountable, was needed.20 As the American pharmacologist and historian of science Chauncey Leake put it, “We feel that the Hitlerites and Stalinists must be wrong, but it seems difficult for us to muster confidence and ability enough to know and show that they are wrong.”21 And the En­glish ethologist and evolutionary theorist Julian Huxley, Thomas Henry Huxley’s grand­son and the first director-­general of UNESCO, similarly mused, “We live u ­ nder the grim material necessity of defeating the Nazi system, ethics and all, but no less ­under the spiritual and intellectual necessity not merely of feeling or believing but of knowing that the Nazi ethics are not just dif­fer­ent from ours, but wrong and false; or at least less right and less true.”22 Scientists answered this moral emergency by turning to biological essentialism. In Britain, the embryologist C. H. Waddington argued that nature itself provided the stable and infallible guide to morality so desperately needed. Since ethical conduct depended on the kind of creatures ­human beings w ­ ere, ethics must be based on scientific facts about the world and the ­human species. “The ethical princi­ple ‘Be good, sweet child!’ derives what validity it has,” Waddington wrote, “from social facts as real as the calorie quota for ­human survival.”23 Heedless of any warnings about committing the naturalistic fallacy, Waddington placed values squarely within the purview of science.24 In the United States, the peace biologists retooled their World War I–​ era arguments to meet the new crisis. Drawing once again from Kropotkin, ­these biologists identified harmonious social interaction—­mutual aid, not competition—as the principal mechanism of the evolutionary pro­ cess, and therefore as the highest moral good. Conklin, the Prince­ton embryologist, affirmed that “biologically life is maintained by continual balance, cooperation, and compromise, and the same princi­ples apply to the life of society.”25 The University of Chicago neurologist C. Judson Herrick likewise declared, “That social stability upon which the survival and comfort of the individual depend and that moral satisfaction upon which his equanimity, poise and stability of character depend arise from the maintenance of right relations with our fellow men. The right relations are ­those that are mutually advantageous.”26 Do unto o ­ thers as you would have o ­ thers do unto you: the Golden Rule was the law of nature as well. 112

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Leake, Conklin’s student, weighed in on the issue in an essay called “Ethicogenesis.”27 H ­ ere he reasoned that, since survival was good, what­ ever aided an organism’s survival, and the survival of all or most species, must be good. What­ever preserved their relationships in the most effective way, what­ever maintained the “ ‘balance of nature,’ ” was good. “Living ­things and their environments react upon each other to produce an adjustment which is conducive t­ oward survival.”28 The better an individual or group “adjust[ed] itself harmoniously” t­oward o ­ thers, the greater chance it would have of continuing its existence. The more harmonious the conduct, the greater ­were the mutual satisfaction and benefit of the relationship. Leake was certain that in formulating the general princi­ple of life, he had hit upon the biological basis for ethics. Moreover, he was certain that the princi­ple was a s­ imple truth, as valid as the law of gravity, regardless of w ­ hether p ­ eople liked it or not. Derived “without permitting the intrusion of the emotions of fear or desire,” the princi­ple just was, and it was in every­one’s best interests to act accordingly.29 At the Christmas 1940 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Leake convened a symposium on science and ethics, which included his teacher Conklin, Herrick, and several other like-­minded biologists and historians of science and medicine. The participants agreed that altruistic be­hav­ior was higher—­not only morally, but also biologically, associated with evolutionarily more advanced ce­re­bral areas—­than egoistic be­hav­ior, localized in more primitive brain areas. They concurred also that mutual aid was the hallmark of democracy: “The criterion of harmonious adjustment or reflective agreement, freely arrived at, [distinguishes] demo­cratic ethics from totalitarian ethics.” Taken together, ­these claims provided a biological reason, grounded in nature, for preferring democracy to any other form of government. The group put to a vote and unanimously affirmed the following proposition: “The probability of survival of a relationship between ­humans, or groups of ­humans, increases with the extent to which the relationship is mutually satisfying and beneficial.”30 Arguments for the wrongness of fascism and communism would no longer have to rely on a mere feeling, backed by the nonjudgmental stance of relativism. Nature herself was speaking on the side of democracy. By such an objective standard, Nazi ethics would be mea­sured and definitively proven false. The ecologist Warder Clyde Allee, Herrick’s Chicago colleague, made such pronouncements into an active program of research.31 Focusing 113

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on dominance-­subordination relations in animal groups—in which a dominant animal can peck or bite another without being harmed in return—­ Allee was well aware of the role of competition between individuals in ­animal ecol­ogy. Yet his own experiments showed that the ultimate effect of such competition (if not overly severe) was actually to produce a well-­ organized, smoothly functioning, integrated society: a stabilized group in which cooperation reigned supreme. By disrupting the pecking order of a group of hens and comparing them to undisturbed groups, Allee found that “the or­ga­nized flocks eat more, maintain weight better and spend less energy in fighting, bluffing, and pecking each other than is the case with the flock that is daily subject to reor­ga­ni­za­tion.”32 An or­ga­ nized flock as a cooperating unit had survival value; all its members w ­ ere better off, and such groups ­were more apt to cooperate with ­others at higher social levels. The altruistic forces in nature, Allee concluded, w ­ ere more impor­ tant than the egoistic ones, for without the former the evolution of complex forms from simpler ones could never have occurred. He pointed to several other lines of evidence showing that interrelation and interdependence ­were beneficial. Spermatozoa when dispersed lost fertilizing power more quickly than when massed together. Colonial protozoa evolved into more complex forms ­because cells remained attached ­after dividing and cooperated closely. Natu­ral se­lection turned out to work more effectively in populations of a certain size—­not too densely packed, to be sure—­but also not composed merely of scattered, isolated individuals. No animal was solitary throughout its life history, Allee asserted; all found protection in numbers, safety en masse. Like Conklin and Herrick, Allee drew a clear moral lesson from his science. The view of evolution as survival of the fittest, the Hobbesian war of each against all—­the view eagerly a­ dopted by the Nazis—­was wrong, not just morally but factually too. Allee’s evidence showed that “­human altruistic drives are as firmly based on animal ancestry as is man himself. Our tendencies ­toward goodness are as innate as our tendencies ­toward intelligence; we could do well with more of both.”33 For Allee, ­these biological findings made plain the proper organ­ization of a postwar world: the administration of relief to all ­peoples, regardless of politics or bound­aries; bilateral disarmament; and the establishment of an international organ­ization (much like UNESCO) to educate all p ­ eoples in nonviolent techniques. Though far from the battlefields, the biolo-

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gists’ work and its realization, Allee believed, was a “practical engineering job,” just as crucial as any military effort in ensuring that, once the war was fi­nally over, t­ here would be a world left to which it would be worth returning.

Montagu’s Turn t­oward Biological Essentialism and Its Fate at UNESCO The peace biologists proselytized to broad audiences in the early 1940s in Science and The Scientific Monthly, and it was prob­ably in the pages of ­those magazines that Montagu first encountered them. The crisis of ethics they faced and the powerlessness of cultural relativism to resolve the crisis immediately resonated with him and with his own desire to defeat racism. The peace biologists’ work led him to abandon his exclusive reliance on relativism and supplement it with an emphasis on biological universals. Discarding his e­ arlier admonition that nature was not to be used as a means of justifying action, he began to argue that “the spirit of altruism, of co­ operation, is very much more natu­ral to man than is that of egoism or antagonism.”34 The tendency ­toward cooperation was a key force in evolution and could thus provide a blueprint for h ­ uman be­hav­ior as well. In the 1945 edition of his book Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fal­ lacy of Race, Montagu took his first steps away from complete cultural relativism and ­toward biological essentialism. “Certainly aggressiveness exists in nature, but ­there is also a healthy non-­ruthless competition, and very strong drives t­oward social and cooperative be­hav­ior,” he wrote. “­These forces do not operate in­de­pen­dently, but together, as a w ­ hole, and the evidence strongly indicates that of all ­these drives the princi­ple of cooperation is dominant and biologically the most impor­tant.” That evolution moved in a certain direction, and that that direction indicated what was good, was now clear: “Without the princi­ple of cooperation, of sociability and mutual aid, the pro­gress of organic life, the improvement of the organism, and the strengthening of the species become utterly incomprehensible.”35 For Montagu, this princi­ple explained ­human evolution, and the ­human ­future relied on its further development. Montagu never abandoned relativism entirely; the flexibility and educability of ­human be­hav­ior and its dependence on culturally mediated experience w ­ ere ever-­present themes in his work. But from 1945 on, ­these themes w ­ ere always accompanied by a stress on biologically based

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cooperative drives. He saw no conflict between the biological and the cultural claims: in order for the cooperative drive to blossom, h ­ umans had to be exposed to the right sort of environment. Only proper nurture could bring ­human nature to full fruition; if the natu­ral drives w ­ ere frustrated, aggressive be­hav­ior would be the result. The 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race clearly evinced his debts to the peace biologists. In his analy­sis of the concluding paragraph 21 of the Statement, Montagu stockpiled the evidence for his claim that “man is born with drives t­oward cooperation.” Citing Allee’s work, he argued that animate nature displayed a drive to create social groupings, ­whether ­these w ­ ere the aggregations of individual cells or the flocking be­hav­ior of higher animals. This drive t­ oward sociality had its basis in the universal fact of biological reproduction: that all cells originated from other cells and must, at least for a time, depend on them. ­Whether sexual or asexual, reproduction was a pro­cess of interaction and interdependence between the parent and the new organism, and the relationship, characteristic of all animal and plant life, indicated for Montagu “the fundamentally social nature of all living t­ hings.” From Kropotkin and Leake, Montagu borrowed the idea that cooperation and mutual aid w ­ ere the stronger forces in evolution, that fitness was a quality properly attributed to a group, and that the fitness of an individual derived from its membership in a group.36 Montagu invested the natu­ral cooperation claim with a distinctive emotional coloring absent, for example, from Kropotkin. Drawing on the object relations school of psychoanalysis and emphasizing the importance of relationships, Montagu equated mutual aid with love: “Love, social be­hav­ior, cooperation, and security mean very much the same t­hing. Without love ­there can be no healthy social be­hav­ior, cooperation or security. . . . ​What man wants is . . . ​dependent security, the feeling that he is part of a group, accepted, wanted, loved and loving.” The feeling was not merely a broad sociality or solidarity, as Kropotkin had maintained; for Montagu the sense of connection was nothing less than love. And the tendency to love was as biologically inbuilt as any other h ­ uman need. “The princi­ple that controls all biologically healthy be­hav­ior is love,” he wrote. “Men who do not love one another are sick”—­not from any internal disease, but from adherence to false values externally imposed by a corrupt culture. “Do what we ­will, our drives ­toward goodness are as biologically determined as our drives ­toward breathing.” For Montagu, the cooperative drive would help bring about a peaceful postwar world: “[Science] 116

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brands the theories of the race discriminators, the hate mongers, as not merely immoral but unnatural.”37 Despite the drafting committee’s aspirations, the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race failed to create consensus. The ge­ne­ticist L.  C. Dunn objected to the committee’s makeup—­all social scientists and no biologists—­and to its assertion that race was a “social myth”: “The physical anthropologists and the man in the street both know that races exist,” he countered.38 The ge­ne­ticist Theodosius Dobzhansky agreed that nothing would be gained by forbidding use of the term “race,” as Montagu had advised.39 Critics of the Statement, writing in the British anthropological journal Man, argued that just as physical differences between the races existed, ­mental or temperamental differences might also one day be uncovered. The Statement had categorically eliminated that possibility; the critics demanded that it be left open.40 Montagu’s natu­ral cooperation claim came in for a special objection. The claim derived value from supposed fact: a moral lesson was drawn from “biological studies.” But, the critics countered, this move inappropriately mixed ethics into what should be a purely scientific m ­ atter. What if, the critics asked, the “facts” turned out to be wrong—­should the values then also be rejected? If the facts ­were disproved, might this not give ammunition to racists and Nazis, who would perceive it as a weakness of the antiracist argument? And ­couldn’t such racists, as they always had, search in nature for “facts” that they could then use to bolster their own social views? “An attempt to base judgments of value upon scientific theories inevitably incurs certain risks,” one critic wrote in Man.” 41 ­Because staking its authority in nature could backfire, the claim’s principal strength was now reinterpreted as a key flaw. To remedy ­these perceived defects, in June 1951 UNESCO convened a dif­fer­ent committee, this time of “Physical Anthropologists and Ge­ne­ ticists,” to draft a second Statement “on the Nature of Race and Race Differences.” 42 Social scientists ­were excluded, except for Montagu, and t­ here was now no mention of the natu­ral cooperation claim. The authors of the second Statement attempted to detach facts from moral meaning: no ­matter what was discovered about race, the second Statement averred, it would in no way affect the ethical equality of h ­ uman beings. While Montagu and his biological colleagues had tried to rewrite the rules of science, joining fact and value, setting their prescriptions for ­human be­hav­ior on a secure biological basis, UNESCO responded by prying science apart from ethics. 117

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The Rutgers Debacle At the same time that Montagu’s UNESCO Statement was encountering criticism, his academic ­career was faltering. Dissatisfied with his position at Hahnemann, teaching anatomy, he had been casting about for employment elsewhere.43 During the spring semester of 1945, he taught in the sociology department at Harvard and received vague assurances from colleagues that they would find him a job if they could. When Montagu was offered the founding chairmanship of a new department of anthropology at Rutgers, he leapt at the opportunity. Moving his ­family and his extensive library from Narberth, Pennsylvania, to Prince­ton, New Jersey, he took up teaching duties in the fall of 1949, planned to stay “for the rest of my academic life,” and dreamed of making the new department “one of the best in the United States.” 44 From the beginning, however, the appointment was a peculiar one.45 Montagu was told he needed to provide his own funding for the first year but was apparently promised that the university would assume financial responsibility thereafter. By the spring of 1950, though, the dean made it clear that no money was forthcoming to support Montagu or the department, and that the department would have to be discontinued if Montagu could not find funding from outside sources. (­Whether this was a s­ imple misunderstanding or something more sinister is not clear from the correspondence. The dean claimed to have explained the terms of employment; Montagu angrily retorted that, had he fully understood the financial risks, “I should frankly have thought you certifiably insane” to have made such an offer.46) The anthropologist sought sponsorship from foundations, corporations, private individuals, and the Office of Naval Research, all to no avail. The second year of his appointment, 1950–1951, Montagu withdrew from teaching and worked from his home on Cherry Hill Road in Prince­ton, on an unsalaried leave of absence. In August  1951 he fulminated against the dean’s intransigence—­“We are now entering upon the third year of an impossible, and to me no longer tolerable situation”—­but the administration was unmoved by his appeals.47 For the next four years Montagu remained, nominally, a member of the faculty, but was unpaid. Continuing to sign his letters “Chairman,” he concealed the awkward fact that ­there was no department of which to be chairman. The situation forced him to make a virtue of necessity.

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­ nder pressure to support himself and his ­family, while existing in a kind U of academic limbo, Montagu turned full time to public lecturing and writing for popu­lar audiences.

Love as the Law of Life Although the consensus on race and ­human nature that the 1950 UNESCO Statement represented was short-­lived, Montagu’s devotion to its ideals was not. He continued to stake the claim for a natu­ral cooperation drive and to make the claim available and understandable to as broad an audience of nonspecialists as pos­si­ble. In popu­lar journals he wrote articles with such titles as “Man’s Social Appetite” and “Social Instincts,” though he often preferred the terms “drive” or “need” to “instinct.” 48 Two books he wrote in the 1950s took up the theme as well.49 In On Being H ­ uman—­which he hopefully predicted could “well become the most influential book of the twentieth c­ entury”—­Montagu presented and interpreted the latest biological and psychological evidence for cooperation as the law of life.50 Drawing again on Kropotkin and Allee, as he had in the UNESCO Statement, Montagu argued that all life, even in its lowest forms, was inherently social and cooperative, and that it received certain benefits from being so. By virtue of being a biological organism, man too possessed such a “social appetite,” and the facts of man’s biological nature indicated the direction in which his be­hav­ior must develop. Pivoting neatly from the descriptive to the prescriptive, Montagu wrote, “What is ­here clearly determines what ­ought to be; . . . ​the biological facts give a biological validation to the princi­ple of co-­operation, or love, in ­human life.”51 Citing the psychoanalysts Margaret Ribble, Charlotte Bühler, and Loretta Bender, Montagu argued that the ­human infant was born an actively cooperating organism biologically equipped to give and receive love, a relationship epitomized by the bond between the breastfeeding m ­ other and her infant. The frustration of that innate need for love, Montagu contended, led to combativeness and aggression and ultimately to ­actual physical illness. Quoting at length from Trigant Burrow and Alfred Adler, Montagu maintained that the isolated individual was a myth and that only the psychologically disordered thought in terms of “I”—­“in terms of competition instead of cooperation, in narrow self interests instead of ­altruism, in atomism (especially atom-­bombism) instead of universalism,

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in the value of money instead of the value of man.”52 Education must be re­oriented to impart to c­ hildren “the fourth R”—­human relations—­and ­ultimately society must be rebuilt on the values of love, altruism, and goodness. The task was arduous to be sure, but guaranteed to succeed in the long run, since it involved relearning what e­ very living cell and e­ very animal in its innermost being already knew. In a letter outlining the argument of On Being ­Human, Montagu declared in no uncertain terms, “At the ­human level . . . ​cooperation or love is not less but even more complexly biologically determined than it is in non-­human organisms, and that in this connexion what is, should be if the ­human being is to maintain physical ‘and’ ­mental health.” Emphasizing the point, he insisted: “That ‘goodness’ is biologically determined. That value in this context is a positive fact of nature. That . . . ​it is not a ­matter of choice, but of desire which is biologically determined.”53 ­These ­were not the words of one who believed ­human nature to be a blank slate. Rather, Montagu willingly and openly embraced biological determinism as a term and a concept. In Darwin: Competition and Cooperation, which he dedicated to Kropotkin, Montagu set out to refute the “Darwinian fallacy” that evolution was mainly a m ­ atter of extermination of the weakest and survival of the fittest. Montagu situated Darwin in his late-­nineteenth-­century context of cutthroat capitalism and racialized imperialism and argued that t­ hese circumstances left their impress on Darwin’s definition of natu­ral se­ lection as strug­gle. Assembling the evidence for a dif­fer­ent conception, Montagu quoted a wide array of scientists who argued for the importance of cooperation as a key ­factor in evolution. In their view, cooperation and altruism ­were forces that could ultimately bind all ­peoples together, in a UNESCO-­like ideal of ­human unity. In contrast, Darwin’s view held that intragroup cooperation, to the extent that it existed, only fitted groups more successfully for competition with each other. Montagu pulled no punches against the ­father of evolutionary theory. Darwin’s was the view of a “biological jingo imperialist,” a “struggle-­for-­survivor,” and “only at times a weak co-­operator.”54 Montagu’s books caught the eye of at least one influential reader. In March 1953, Albert Einstein, Montagu’s Prince­ton neighbor, told the anthropologist that he had read On Being ­Human “with vivid interest.” However, Einstein continued, he disagreed with Montagu about the “­human psychological heritage.” “I have the strong impression,” Einstein explained, “that not only social leanings but also pugnacious and 120

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cruel impulses are congenital within us. This seems quite natu­ral if one takes into account the probable life and constitutions of our prehistoric ­fathers.”55 Einstein’s ideas about h ­ uman nature came from a famous exchange he had had with Sigmund Freud twenty years ­earlier, as Hitler ­rose to power in Germany.56 Surmising that “man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction,” Einstein had asked Freud—­“the expert in the lore of ­human instincts”—­whether man’s ­mental evolution could be controlled so as to deliver him from the menace of war. Freud’s answer had been, basically, no. Reiterating the stance he had taken in Civilization and Its Discontents, the psychoanalyst had pessimistically replied that since the dawn of time, man had used vio­lence to ­settle conflicts, and that a “destructive instinct was at work in ­every living creature.” Freud was convinced ­there was no use in trying to suppress or expunge such inclinations, and that even international organ­izations dedicated to world peace could not combat this basic aggressive tendency. “Right is founded on brute force,” Freud had concluded, “and even ­today needs vio­lence to maintain it.”57 Einstein had replied gratefully for such sage counsel. Now, some two de­cades l­ ater, Montagu gave Einstein a diametrically dif­fer­ent answer. Drawing together the evidence he had collected, the anthropologist wrote, “I am happy to say that I believe I can now demonstrate to anyone’s satisfaction the fact that man is born with not one iota of pugnacity and cruelty within him . . . ​that, on the contrary, he is born good—­good in the sense that his innate drives are all oriented in the direction of desiring to be loved, and, what is equally impor­tant, desiring to love ­others.” Aggression resulted from the frustration of this impulse and was to be pacified simply by the giving of love.58 To what extent Einstein was persuaded to abandon the reigning psychoanalytic orthodoxy remains uncertain. Montagu met the physicist at his home in Prince­ton in May 1953 to discuss their views, a­ fter which the anthropologist reported that Einstein had completely reversed his belief in innate depravity.59 But Einstein’s own account hinted that he was not entirely won over. He and Montagu certainly agreed that a peaceful world was the ultimate goal; in that context, Einstein noted, “our difference of opinion concerning the inventory of our heritage does not ­matter.” 60 The lingering disagreement between the two indicated the difficulty of changing anyone’s mind, let alone Einstein’s, on so fundamental an issue, and offered Montagu a foretaste of the intractable debate over h ­ uman nature that lay in store for him. 121

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Sorokin, Survivor of the Red Terror During the years in which he was nominally attached to Rutgers, Montagu’s allegiance actually lay with a dif­fer­ent institution altogether: the Harvard Research Center in Altruistic Integration and Creativity, founded and directed by the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin.61 When Sorokin established his center in 1949, Montagu quickly affiliated with it, and Sorokin’s support, both intellectual and financial, helped sustain the anthropologist through the difficult Rutgers years. Although the two men came to espouse similar views of ­human nature, the paths they took to reach ­those views ­were very dif­fer­ent. By all accounts the first several de­cades of Sorokin’s life w ­ ere harrowing. Pitirim Sorokin was born in 1889 in the small village of Turya in northwestern Rus­sia. His ­mother died when he was three and his f­ ather was driven to drink, so young Sorokin and his elder ­brother w ­ ere raised by their aunt and ­uncle, who helped them learn the silversmithing trade but often left them to fend for themselves.62 Sorokin nevertheless remembered his childhood in glowing terms, extolling the healthfulness of the rugged country life and the Komi peasantry’s society of “mutual aid.” 63 During the attempted overthrow of Czar Nicholas Romanov in 1905–1906, Sorokin joined the anti-­czarist Social Revolutionary Party, avoiding the more radical Marxists. Hunted down and jailed for his work as “Comrade Ivan,” an “itinerant missionary” of the revolution, he eventually withdrew to his f­ amily’s home, but not before distinguishing himself as a po­liti­cal speaker and or­ga­niz­er.64 In 1909 Sorokin enrolled in the Psycho-­Neurological Institute in St. Petersburg, and l­ater in the University of St. Petersburg, from which he graduated with a degree in criminology and penology in 1914. His plan to take up a lectureship at the university, however, was derailed by the outbreak of the Rus­sian Revolution in February 1917. Once again Sorokin aligned himself with the moderate Social Revolutionaries, not the Bolsheviks, whom Sorokin despised as hypocrites for inflaming the p ­ eople with their violent rhe­toric but ultimately thinking only of themselves. In his memoir Leaves from a Rus­sian Diary, Sorokin depicted the Rus­sian Revolution as wild and anarchistic mob rule, a reign of terror punctuated by the utterly senseless slaughter of innocent ­people. All order was abandoned—­police would not protect, soldiers would not fight, workers would not work—­while the only sanctioned activities ­were speechifying and violent rioting.65 “This voracious monster, the Revolution,” Sorokin 122

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l­ ater wrote, could not “live without drinking h ­ uman blood.” 66 Having no patience for Lenin or Trotsky, the Bolshevik leaders, Sorokin became secretary to Alexander Kerensky, the prime minister of the short-­lived Rus­ sian Provisional Government, and tried through speeches and newspaper editorials to inject some reason and moderation into the lawless mob.67 Sorokin’s activism was informed by the l­ater religious writings of Leo Tolstoy, which he read and praised in a 1912 essay.68 As a child Sorokin had been raised in the Rus­sian Orthodox faith but gave it up in ­favor of revolutionary socialism. Having read Tolstoy, however, Sorokin was moved to believe in the power of nonviolent re­sis­tance to evil to bring about change. For Tolstoy, Chris­tian­ity was not a ­matter of super­natural or miraculous revelation, but a philosophy of life based on peace, love, and altruism. ­These spiritual ideals and techniques became central to Sorokin’s attitude ­toward constructing a new society.69 ­After Kerensky’s defeat and the Bolshevik overthrow of the provisional government, in October  1917, Sorokin was jailed again in what was now called the Petrograd Prison. Upon his release, he and his wife Elena (a botanist whom he had married in May  1917) fled to Moscow, where he lived in constant fear of rearrest and execution as a “counter-­ revolutionary.” Frightened by the random murders of his friends, he went into hiding in the forest, but ­after months of subsisting on roots and berries, as winter came on, he took refuge in the village of Veliki Ustyug. ­There, once again, he was imprisoned. The terror of nightly executions of randomly selected prisoners compounded the wretched living conditions. “­Here exists a real Communism,” Sorokin wryly observed.70 At last, an article by Lenin himself, published in the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda and apparently written at the behest of two of Sorokin’s former students, secured Sorokin’s release. “The realization that I was saved,” he wrote ­later, “that I had actually risen from the dead, quite overwhelmed me.”71 Returning to Petrograd, he found his apartment occupied and his property gone. His former lectureship at the university was, however, still waiting for him, and so he took up teaching sociology. In the bosom of Communist society, living in an unheated room and on starvation rations, he began writing his two-­volume System of Sociology (which he ultimately defended as his doctoral dissertation in sociology in April 1922).72 During the famine of 1921, he investigated the influence of hunger on ­human be­ hav­ior. His writings enraged the Bolshevik press, and in the midst of another counterrevolutionary purge, he was banished. In September 1922, Sorokin left Rus­sia, never to return.73 123

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Following a brief time in Prague, where they joined a community of other Rus­sian émigrés, the Sorokins immigrated to the United States in 1923. They settled in Minneapolis, where Pitirim taught sociology at the University of Minnesota and Elena became professor of botany at Hamline University in St. Paul. In 1930 Sorokin accepted President Abbott Lawrence Lowell’s offer to establish a department of sociology at Harvard, which Sorokin chaired for fourteen years.74 The Sorokins bought a ­house in Winchester, a suburb of Boston, and raised two sons. Having withstood unspeakable horror, Sorokin lived a quiet academic life, tending his garden, enjoying his ­family, and writing his books. But this outward peacefulness contrasted with his dramatic inward quest. Though he had managed to escape the revolution’s clutches, its scars ­were permanent. Revolted by its wanton cruelty and destructiveness, and sickened by its hy­poc­risy, Sorokin found his belief in pro­gress shattered. The usual benchmarks by which Western culture mea­sured its development—­the growth of science and technology, and the modern life they made pos­si­ble—he de­cided ­were no longer sufficient. What was needed was not a temporary or minor fix, but an attack at the root of the prob­lem: a completely new system of values.

Values in Crisis Sorokin’s experience of the revolution transformed him into a virulent critic of communism. In the epilogue to his memoir, written in 1950, he condemned the revolution as “a colossal failure,” for having created “as despotic a government as [was] known in the entire course of ­human history.” Although it had promised to revolutionize all social institutions “from the ­family to business and the state,” it did not abolish exploitation, but only replaced exploitation by private employer “with unlimited exploitation of the p ­ eople by the government” and by the “Communist nobility.”75 Besides its po­liti­cal failures, the revolution also had failed to produce any ­great works of art, science, or lit­er­at­ure; even its science and technology ­were sterile. In its voracious expansion (its only questionable claim to success) it had molded even its enemies in its own image, so that even anti-­Soviet governments a­ dopted the worst aspects of the revolution’s totalitarianism. But the revolution was in fact only one manifestation of a much larger prob­lem, according to Sorokin. Along with the two world wars, it heralded what he called “the d ­ ying sensate order,” a system of material124

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istic values that had sustained Western culture since the M ­ iddle Ages but that was now, beyond doubt, in decline. The sensate system with its exclusive emphasis on sensory and material real­ity had helped produce scientific and technical advance; its materialism had made modern civilization pos­si­ble. But the belief that h ­ umans w ­ ere nothing but m ­ atter ignored the inherent dignity of man and led to man’s treatment merely as a means to some end.76 Moral and ethical relativism resulted: “By their very nature, sensory values are relative,” Sorokin lamented. “We live in an age in which no value, from God to private property is universally accepted. ­There is no norm . . . ​that is universally binding on Hitlerites and anti-­ Hitlerites, Communists and Catholics, the rich and the poor, Negroes and white ­people, atheists and believers.”77 When relativism triumphed, the sensate order had run its course, and moral crisis erupted. In this way Sorokin found himself at the same midcentury pass as Montagu: driven to reject relativism, to attribute the ­century’s wars and disasters to relativism, and to search for absolute values instead. For Sorokin ­these values could be rational—­the truths of mathe­matics, science, law, philosophy, or art—or superrational—­faith in the kingdom of God, in goodness, truth, or beauty. In contrast to the sensory values, t­ hese absolute values ­were “impersonal and universal, altruistic and ennobling.”78 They could make p ­ eople care for something outside of their own narrow self-­interest. And they could be held in common, even by p ­ eople separated by the Iron Curtain: abandoning their superficial competition, and devoting themselves to something higher, nobler, better, unconditional, and universal, the Soviet Union and the United States could overcome their Cold War conflict.79 A violent revolution of the type he had survived was not the way, in Sorokin’s view, to usher in the new system of values and the new society it would produce. Since all revolutions ­were founded on hate, they could never lead to a higher social order. Only hate for a common ­enemy bound the members of a band or nation together, and once the e­ nemy was eliminated, the former allies all turned on one another. “Cruelty, hatred, and injustice,” he asserted, “never can and never w ­ ill be able to create a m ­ ental, 80 moral, or material millennium.” Instead, entirely dif­fer­ent methods ­were called for—­those of creativity, freedom, and love, concepts that Sorokin treated as interdependent and interchangeable. To usher in the new millennium and the new idealistic order, interpersonal and intergroup relationships had to be infused with what he called “unselfish, creative love,” a type of altruism that 125

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he thought “ideally formulated” in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, but found in other religions as well.81 “The techniques of love instead of hate, of creative construction instead of destruction, of reverence for life in the place of serving death, of real freedom instead of coercion and pseudo-­ freedom—­such are the techniques needed to rebuild the ­house of humanity.”82 As the sensate order passed away, a new epoch in the history of humankind, an “ideational” order based in love, would take its place, transforming socie­ties, cultures, and personalities. During that epoch, ­there would be “a complete unification of humanity”—of all its parties, nations, creeds, races, and classes” to fight against the “inhuman enemies” of death, disease, misery, insanity, and “uncreativity.”83 Having suffered through a paroxysm of hate and destruction, Sorokin was moved to become an apostle of love.84

Creative Love and Altruism at Harvard Convinced as he was that humanity stood at a brink—­that the old values ­were ­dying and that a new epoch was about to dawn—­Sorokin was equally sure that the place to welcome the epoch was not the Department of Sociology at Harvard. Neither Sorokin’s prophetic sociology nor his impatience with critics endeared him to his colleagues.85 In 1944, Dean Paul Buck ended Sorokin’s chairmanship and Talcott Parsons took over, and in 1946 Parsons, along with Gordon Allport, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Henry Murray, founded the Department of Social Relations, which subsumed Sociology.86 Sorokin was a member of the new department, but by then he had already formed a friendship with the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal executive and philanthropist Eli Lilly.87 With Lilly’s financial backing, Sorokin established his own interdisciplinary institute, and in January 1949, the Harvard Research Center in Altruistic Integration and Creativity opened its doors. In the center, Sorokin built a haven outside the Harvard mainstream, a kind of alternative academic universe, where he could pursue his science of “amitology.” During the ten years of its existence, the center supported research, sponsored symposia, gave its imprint to edited volumes, and tried to increase the amount of love in the world.88 The center’s principal aim was to make altruism and love into objects of scientific study. “Since the better brains are busy with other prob­lems, including invention of the means of extermination of h ­ uman beings, . . . ​­under t­ hese conditions, somebody, somehow, must devote him126

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self to a study of the miracle of love.”89 Sorokin described love as a force whose energy could be manifested in dif­fer­ent ways. ­There was religious love, the attempt to reach ­union with God, and ethical love, the essence of goodness. ­There was psychological love—­friendship, re­spect, adoration, or empathy—in which the loving individual’s ego merged with the beloved’s. ­There was social love: “a meaningful interaction . . . ​where the aspirations and aims of one person are shared and helped in their realization by other persons.”90 Under­lying ­these familiar manifestations, Sorokin argued, was “ontological”—­that is, physical and biological—­love. The physical aspects of love included the forces that bound subatomic particles into the unity of the atom; that bound atoms into ele­ments, and ele­ments into compounds; forces like electricity, heat, magnetism, and gravitation that attracted, integrated, ordered, and made “mutually accessible” all parts of the cosmos. Sorokin spoke of “love energy” as if it w ­ ere a physical t­ hing that could be generated, accumulated, and diffused. Drawing on Montagu’s work, Sorokin included the act of reproduction in ontological love, since both asexual fission and sexual fusion involved interdependence between cells. Citing Kropotkin, Allee, Holmes, Gerard, and Montagu, Sorokin concluded that mutual aid, the social instinct, sympathy, and empathy w ­ ere more power­ful drives than competitiveness, and that without them life would not be pos­si­ble: “Without uniting, integrating, and co­ ordinating functions of biological love-­energy, the world of life could hardly have emerged.”91 For Sorokin, the love that bound man to God, or one person to another, was simply an upward translation of the same basic, necessary, natu­ral force that kept cells from disaggregating. ­Because love was biological at base, it possessed healing power. The “curative and life-­giving functions of love follow from the very nature of love as the concentrated form of life and from the nature of life as a form of love-­energy.”92 Sorokin collected dozens of anecdotes in which an act of kindness shown by an intended victim to her tormentor disarmed the would-be killer, burglar, or rapist. He conducted studies of friendship between Harvard and Radcliffe students. He claimed that p ­ eople who gave 93 and received love lived longer and healthier lives; that love could cure ­mental disorders; and, citing René Spitz (and echoing Montagu), that ­mother love was a vital necessity for ­children. Social movements that worked by peaceful means, such as Gandhi’s satyagraha, ­were infinitely more successful and effective than violent revolutions.94 Sorokin conceived of love as quite literally a kind of “life-­giving ‘vitamin.’ ”95 127

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In order for love and altruism to have the powers claimed for them, they had to be practiced with emotional force. Simply g­ oing through the motions would never work: the kindness shown to ­others had to be genuine. “Without intense love, sympathy, empathy, compassion, and other emotional participation in the joys and sorrows of o ­ thers we cannot be deeply moved to actions of altruism, generosity, or sacrifice. For any vigorous activity we need always strong emotional support.”96 Just as love was power­ful ­because it was at root biological, to fulfill its potential it had to well up from deep inward sources. Alongside ­these descriptions of the aspects and power of love and altruism, Sorokin studied p ­ eople who w ­ ere selflessly good and tried to determine what made them tick. In his Altruistic Love of 1950, Sorokin examined Christian saints and American “good neighbors,” ordinary people generally recognized as acting with genuine and unstinting kindness ­toward ­others. He analyzed their demographics, their upbringing and educational levels, and their talent for self-­control and concluded that their lives ­were longer and psychologically richer ­because of their altruism. To mea­sure the dimensions of their love, he charted out scales of intensity, extensiveness, and duration. Even when frustrated by circumstance, neither the saints nor the good neighbors became aggressive, nor did they show any evidence of Freudian “complexes,” “fixations,” or “repressions.”97 Ultimately, Sorokin’s amitology was prescriptive. Its point was never just to describe and analyze altruists; it was always to encourage more ­people to be like them, to build up the fund of love in the world. “A better knowledge of the how and why of love,” Sorokin wrote, “and through that knowledge the accomplishment of the efficient altruization of persons, institutions, and culture, become mankind’s truly paramount tasks at this turn of history.”98 Though this was an exceedingly complex and difficult task, ­because the means of altruization differed for dif­fer­ent ­people, one ­thing seemed crucial: the reor­ga­ni­za­tion of values, and the ac­cep­tance of a supreme, ultimate value, the “transcendence of group egotism by universal love of every­one to all.”99 In Sorokin’s view, dedication to this ultimate value must happen not just on an intellectual plane, but must thoroughly permeate one’s emotions and feelings, and from t­here, one’s volitions and actions. Montagu and Sorokin began corresponding in the early 1940s, ­after Sorokin read Man’s Most Dangerous Myth and Montagu wrote a book review of Crisis of Our Age.100 By the late 1940s the anthropologist and the 128

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sociologist ­were practicing a kind of mutual aid with each other. They unreservedly encouraged each other’s work. “The biological foundation of Love,” Sorokin assured his younger colleague, “is indeed an impor­tant ­matter to elaborate further and diffuse among mankind.”101 Montagu replied, “I think, Sorokin, that we are ­here on the track of the most impor­ tant of all discoveries for man. The biosocial proof of the truth that without love man cannot live at peace ­either with himself or with ­others. Indeed, that he cannot live at all, except as a sick and confused brute.”102 The two contributed to each other’s edited volumes.103 Each incorporated the other’s arguments and findings into his own work. They agreed on the aim of the research center—­that amitology should be a scientific research program—­and Sorokin used his center’s funding to support Montagu’s research proj­ects on the topic. Montagu proposed to study the effect of tactile stimulation of infants on the ­later development of their personalities.104 At Sorokin’s suggestion, Montagu also tested dif­fer­ent approaches for reducing sibling rivalry in a f­ amily (­later revealed to be his own), approaches that he envisioned using in other families by enlisting the parents as experimenters.105 In a proj­ect carried out at a New Jersey high school, Montagu determined how cooperative and altruistic be­hav­ior could be generated in hostile situations or environments.106 Montagu also helped Sorokin try to secure funding for the center, which seemed perennially strapped for cash, despite Lilly’s ongoing support. Both men hoped to find Montagu employment at the center. “If kind God would send this Center a million or two dollars, I should be very glad to offer you a position,” Sorokin wrote the anthropologist in January 1950, and, two years ­later, “You naturally are the person whom I would like to have formally attached to the Center.”107 Despite ­these hopes, the position never materialized. In 1954, Montagu wrote to ask plaintively “­whether ­there w ­ ill ever be a chance of my coming up and joining you.”108 By then the anthropologist had been angling for a job at Harvard for more than a de­cade. None of the obstacles they encountered lessened their dedication to their mission. Alienated from mainstream academic social science, Sorokin and Montagu shared the conviction that their outsider status increased in proportion to their access to the truth. Sorokin ridiculed the complaints of his critics: “ ‘If one studies criminals and the insane and the stupid, such a study is to be regarded as scientific. If one studies geniuses, saints, altruists, and very sane persons, this is preaching.’ Statements of this sort are the products of a disintegrating sensate order, and respective 129

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4.1  Pitirim Sorokin circa 1950.

Harvard University News Office Photo­graph.

sensate pseudo-­scientists.”109 He caricatured con­temporary academic social scientists as “quantophrenics” and “testomaniacs,” “numerologists” and “statistical cultists.”110 Against such benighted critics, Montagu stood in solidarity with Sorokin. “A thousand times I have thanked God for you, and two thousand times astonished many of my colleagues by disagreeing with them and supporting you when they have sneered at this ‘sudden interest’ of yours in love. I know that the first decline in their intellectual ‘re­spect’ for me in some quarters came from my aligning myself with your viewpoint.” Nonetheless, Montagu felt, “the w ­ hole world is ready for what we have to say, best of all, the scientists are.”111 In one of their last exchanges, Montagu confided to the sociologist, “­There is no one like you, Pit, and I regret more than I can say that t­ hese thirty years I have not been able to work closer with you. I wish I had gone to Harvard in the twenties instead of to Columbia.”112 (See figure 4.1)

The Gendering of Natu­ral Cooperation In the early 1950s—­still collaborating with Sorokin but aiming to reach wider audiences with his writing—­Montagu gave the claim for natu­ral cooperation a new twist. His 1952 article “The Natu­ral Superiority of ­Women” connected the cooperative drive specifically to w ­ omen’s nature, 130

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asserting that ­women ­were more altruistic and nurturing than men. As he had in the UNESCO Statement on Race and in his work with Sorokin, Montagu continued to assert that cooperation, love, and altruism ­were fundamental, and fundamentally similar, biological drives. But while, in the UNESCO Statement, Montagu had used the claim to bind all humanity together and underscore the oneness of ­human nature, now he gave the claim a gendered dimension. In effect, he defined dif­fer­ent essential natures for ­women and men. “The Natu­ral Superiority of W ­ omen” was written “in one bout at the typewriter” at the request of Norman Cousins, Montagu’s friend and editor of the Saturday Review, where the article appeared in March 1952.113 ­There, and in a book of the same title published ­later that same year, Montagu reinforced his belief in the biological determination of h ­ uman ­be­hav­ior. But now he argued that w ­ omen w ­ ere both biologically and psychologically superior to men (figure  4.2). ­Women’s physical superiority, better health, and re­sis­tance to disease stemmed from the possession of two X chromosomes, both “fully developed structures,” while the Y chromosome was “the merest comma.” “It is to this original chromosomal deficiency that all the vari­ous trou­bles to which the male falls heir can be traced,” he wrote.114 In an argument influenced by Bowlby’s attachment theory, Montagu maintained that w ­ omen’s psychological superiority was a result of the “maternalizing influences” of bearing and rearing ­children.115 “The female in the mother-­child relation has the advantage of having to be more considerate, more self-­sacrificing, more cooperative and more altruistic than usually falls to the lot of the male. . . . ​It is ­because ­women have had to be so unselfish and forbearing and self-­sacrificing and maternal that they possess a deeper understanding than men of what it is to be ­human.”116 As a result of their natu­ral superiority in nurturance, ­women w ­ ere tasked with the responsibility of teaching men (to whom such tendencies came less naturally) how to behave cooperatively. “It is the function of ­women,” Montagu wrote, “to teach men how to be ­human.”117 In the place of a single, biologically based h ­ uman nature, he now posited two essentially distinct natures, one of which was naturally cooperative, the other of which had to learn how to become so. In its gendered form, the claim continued to do po­liti­cal work, linking fact and value and deriving prescriptions for ­human society from assumptions about h ­ uman nature. Montagu argued that the natu­ral ­superiority of ­women—­their inborn capacity for love and nurture, their 131

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4.2  Cover of Ashley

Montagu, The Natu­ral Superiority of ­Women (New York: Lancer, 1961).

position as anchor of the f­amily—­doomed the Soviet attempt to reengineer “natu­ral” bonds. The Communists, Montagu asserted, in their rage to abolish private property, had attempted also to tear apart the f­amily and “masculinize” w ­ omen, putting allegiance to the state above ties to kith and kin.118 In this re­spect, Montagu believed, Soviet communism was 132

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similar to the Nazi regime, which forced ­children to become informers against their own parents. But ­women’s inherent nature would never permit such artificial arrangements to succeed. Exactly as Ardrey did, Montagu used the deep-­seated biological tendencies of h ­ uman nature as a bulwark against the onslaught of totalitarianism, which he portrayed as both morally wrong and thoroughly unnatural. The Natu­ral Superiority of W ­ omen appeared just one year before The Second Sex came out in En­glish translation (1953). But Montagu’s argument differed widely from Simone de Beauvoir’s. While she famously argued that “one is not born, rather one becomes, a w ­ oman,” he affirmed that ­woman was indeed born, compelled to behave in a certain way ­because of her biological makeup.119 While Beauvoir delineated dif­fer­ent types of ­women, Montagu focused on the biological and psychological essentials, which he believed w ­ ere common to all w ­ omen, and never mentioned differences of race, class, or sexuality (white middle-­class heterosexuality was presumed). Montagu did not foresee any power re­ distribution; he was in no doubt that the nature of w ­ omen would keep them subordinate in the po­liti­cal realm. “It is time that w ­ omen realized that men ­will continue to run the world for some time yet, and that they can best assist them to run it more humanely by teaching them, when young, what humanity means. Men w ­ ill thus not feel that they are being demoted,” Montagu assured his readers.120 He celebrated w ­ omen’s strengths, and wanted their strengths to be recognized as such, but without upsetting the status quo. ­Women ­were not just like men and should not strive to become so. Montagu’s message struck an immediate chord with readers who ­were vexed and dismayed by Beauvoir’s radicalism but who nonetheless self-­identified as feminists. Three days a­ fter the article appeared in the Saturday Review, Florence Kitchelt, a social worker and chairwoman of the Connecticut Committee for the Equal Rights Amendment, wrote to Montagu, “It would take more words than you have time to read or I to write to tell you the many ways in which your article . . . ​gives us help and courage. . . . You have broken a trail for us w ­ omen.”121 She ended by asking ­whether Montagu would allow the committee to make the article into a leaflet and distribute it. Montagu l­ater joined the cause, becoming a member of the ERA’s National Advisory Committee.122 Similarly, Marjorie Child Husted, a home economist and businesswoman who had developed the brand image of Betty Crocker, shared Montagu’s message with her fellow members of the Status of W ­ omen 133

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Committee of the American Association of University W ­ omen, a group “naturally most in sympathy with your efforts,” at its November  1952 meeting in Washington.123 The committee, she wrote to Montagu, “is deeply interested in your book, and ­will perhaps be able to open up channels of distribution for it.” Sophie Drinker, a musicologist and historian of ­women in ­music, applauded Montagu’s “gorgeous” article: “Certainly, you should be knighted by the feminists.”124 In 1963, Sonia Pressman, a feminist ­lawyer, used Montagu’s book in support of her argument for the equal pay for ­women bill, which she made at the House ­Labor Committee hearings.125 Montagu’s ­women readers used his article in more personal ways as well. Many planned to show it to their male relatives: “I want my son who is a husband and ­father to read it as a reinforcement of my teaching,” wrote one reader.126 Said another: “I could go on and on about this subjugation of w ­ omen business—­it’s been b ­ ehind the waste of a good many precious years of my own life, for just BEING a w ­ oman means that one must feel guilty about ambition and desire to be something more than ‘just a ­house­wife.’ I might have written one of ­those lost symphonies you spoke of—­but I was a ­woman—­and it was just assumed—by me as well—­that ­there was but one ­future—­marriage, babies—­the end. What a lot of rot!”127 Of course ­women could and should have ­careers, Montagu affirmed, as long as t­ hese did not interfere with w ­ omen’s biological role as love-­giver to their ­children.128 The feminist uptake and use of Montagu’s “natu­ral superiority” argument attest to the varying po­liti­cal meanings of biological determinist arguments. He deployed his conception of ­women’s nature to stake out a moderate liberalism—­anti-­Communist, pro-­democracy, and, as he saw it, pro-­women’s rights—­that avoided both ends of the po­liti­cal spectrum. For the anthropologist and the audiences who embraced his message, feminism and essentialism w ­ ere not opposites. Biology had the potential to liberate. More than any other pieces of writing he did, Montagu’s “Natu­ral Superiority” article and book vaulted him to public notice. Over the course of the next three de­cades, audiences devoured the numerous popu­lar books he wrote on h ­ uman evolution and psy­chol­ogy and the scores of articles he published in magazines, in which he presented himself as an authority on American culture.129 “Natu­ral Superiority” also launched his tele­vi­sion c­ areer. By 1954 he had a regular spot on NBC’s Home Show,

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4.3  Ashley Montagu in the early

1950s. “All he does is play himself—­ a professor. . . . ​And you should see the fan mail! It’s fantastic!” Tele­vi­sion producer Bob Herridge quoted in Jhan and June Robbins, “The Anthropologist and the Ladies,” New York Herald Tribune, September 20, 1953, p. SM 10.

hosted by Arlene Francis, as “­family affairs editor” and “anthropology lecturer.” The show’s appeal was “directly to the h ­ ouse­wife and m ­ other,” Montagu explained to one of the show’s sponsors, “and it is with American ­mothers that I think we can do some of our most fundamental work in attempting to clarify social issues.”130 Montagu also made regular appearances in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s on To­night Starring Jack Paar, The To­night Show with Johnny Carson, and The Phil Donahue Show, where he chatted knowledgeably with the hosts about every­thing from home births, breastfeeding, and circumcision, to voodoo death, acu­punc­ture, and meditation. For his 1957 per­for­mance on The $64,000 Question he won a large cash prize and a Cadillac.131 If the fan mail he received is any indication, audiences—­especially female ones—­swooned over his TV persona, complete with patrician-­ sounding name and resonant English-­accented baritone, silvered hair and horn rimmed-­glasses, avuncular manner and dry wit.132 “Where can a girl meet fellows of your type?” one viewer pleaded.133 Another gushed, “How can one man be so handsome, intelligent, and beautifully endowed with such a voice!!! Not only your words but the sound of them must have thrilled your female audience.”134 Ever a­ dept at self-­fashioning, Montagu—­the scrappy and resourceful in­de­pen­dent scholar—­played to perfection the role of esteemed professor. If t­here was an irony in the situation, his audiences seemed neither to notice nor to care. (See figure 4.3.)

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The Rutgers Denouement Just as his popularity was burgeoning, Montagu’s situation at Rutgers, always precarious, met its end. In November 1952, he addressed the Wisconsin ­Women’s Club in Milwaukee on “On Being ­Human: The Nature of ­Human Nature.” ­Here, however, he failed to charm his listeners. A Rutgers trustee named Harry Derby heard about the talk from his neighbor Milo Hopkins, a bank president and ­father of a Rutgers student. The audience of Milwaukee ladies, Hopkins reported, was “shocked and highly insulted,” when Montagu, having argued for the importance of love, “suddenly shifted to a blistering attack on Senator McCarthy. It was quite apparent that Dr. Montagu’s position coincided with the usual Communistic theme song, and you may be assured that the ladies ­were not in a receptive mood on Nov. 6 just two days a­ fter the election.” Objecting to the disgraceful per­for­mance, a large group of ladies angrily surrounded Montagu who, amid the uproar, “seemed to shout that Senator McCarthy had failed to disclose a single Communist.”135 Derby, the Rutgers trustee, duly relayed the story to Lewis Webster Jones, the Rutgers president, who redoubled his efforts to get rid of the anthropologist.136 The next time Montagu requested his annual $750 for “department expenses,” Jones denied the request and suggested that it was perhaps time for Montagu to sever his ties with Rutgers.137 Montagu seems to have wanted to stay on, arguing that his many public appearances, always with the Rutgers name attached, provided the university “­free prestige advertising.”138 For the controversy-­ averse top administration, however, Montagu represented too ­great a risk. Having lost both his funding and the university’s trust, the anthropologist fi­nally resigned from Rutgers in the spring of 1955.139 The administrators heaved a sigh of relief. Dean  H.  G. Owen, who had negotiated Montagu’s original ill-­fated contract, thanked President Jones “personally for bringing to an end one of the most annoying administrative situations in which I ever involved myself. . . . ​I had hoped that a ‘laissez-­faire’ policy would discourage Montague [sic] but it ­didn’t.”140 Untethered at last from academia, Montagu penned (­under the pseudonym “Academicus Mentor”) a biting satire of university mores impishly titled Up the Ivy, offering young professors tongue-­in-­cheek advice on “how to climb in the academic world without appearing to try.” (The first and most impor­tant rule: “Keep your mouth shut.”)141 Montagu’s outsider status also allowed him to make common cause with Robert Ardrey, whose ideas about innate h ­ uman aggressiveness he other­wise 136

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abhorred. When Ardrey’s first popu­lar science book, African Genesis, was published in 1961, Montagu wrote to its author, “You are a remarkable chap and a far better scientist than a good many of my sahib-­ anthropologists. I ­shall be interested to see how profoundly they try to ignore your book.”142 Ardrey responded, “I’m not sorry w ­ e’re antagonists, ­because you have to be an antagonist with SOMEBODY and it’s good to have one you re­spect.”143 As pop­ul­ ar­izers marginalized from the academic mainstream, Montagu and Ardrey created an alliance that cut across the usual ­battle lines in debates about ­human nature. Montagu’s Rutgers debacle had a fitting coda many years l­ater. In 1969, a new department of anthropology was formed at Rutgers, with the anthropologists Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger at the helm, and with a strong biological focus. Fox approached Montagu to make amends. Graciously addressing him as the “ ‘founder’ of anthropology at Rutgers,” Fox said he knew ­there had been some unpleasantness years before, d ­ idn’t know exactly what, but “we look forward not back.” Might Montagu be willing to be affiliated with the new department, Fox inquired. Of course—he added almost as an afterthought—­the position would be unpaid.144

The Skein Unravels Though their ­careers diverged a­ fter the mid-1950s, both Sorokin and Montagu continued to propound the key biological virtues of cooperation, altruism, and love. Sorokin’s research center remained open u ­ ntil 1959, when he retired from Harvard; the Lilly Endowment approved its final grant in 1957. In the meantime, Sorokin sought to place on a more permanent footing his study of love’s power and the lives of selfless ­people. He began planning a more ambitious venture in­de­pen­dent of Harvard: a Research Society for Creative Altruism. In October 1955, he renewed his friendship with fellow Rus­sian émigré Igor I. Sikorsky, owner of a successful aircraft manufacturing firm in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Sikorsky shared Sorokin’s view that mankind was in a crisis brought on by materialism and relativism, a crisis resolvable only through a moral and ­spiritual awakening based on religion, especially Christ’s teachings.145 In answer to Sorokin’s appeal, Sikorsky underwrote the new society. In April 1956 the society was officially incorporated with offices at 8 Cliff Street, Winchester, Mas­sa­chu­setts, Sorokin’s home. Its charge, in Sorokin’s words, was “to enrich the existing knowledge of creative unselfish love in all its essential aspects.”146 137

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The research society’s membership included a diverse range of social scientists, religious figures, politicians, and business leaders.147 Its connection to humanistic psy­chol­ogy was cemented with the addition of Abraham Maslow, the Brandeis University psychologist who had begun corresponding with Sorokin in 1950. Maslow’s work focused on self-­ actualizing ­people: ­those who had managed largely to fulfill their lower needs for food and safety, love and self-­esteem, to reach the pinnacle of psychological health, where they realized their true selves and became the ­people they w ­ ere supposed to be. Maslow shared Sorokin’s emphasis on biology: conceiving of ­these psychological needs as drawing strength from their under­lying biological basis, Maslow wrote that even self-­ actualization, the realization of one’s potential, was the following and heeding of one’s “instinctoid” inner nature.148 For Maslow, psychotherapy was a means of “uncovering, . . . ​strengthening . . . ​our weakened and lost instinctoid tendencies and instinct-­remnants, our painted over animal selves.”149 Self-­actualizers w ­ ere all distinctive individuals, but they shared certain positive traits: ability to love and be loved, a sense of childlike won­der at the world, and devotion to a calling or an ideal larger than themselves.150 Sorokin saw the resemblance to his own studies of good ­people. “Our creative altruists are in some re­spects similar to your positive types,” Sorokin noted to the psychologist, and Maslow replied, “I am definitely ­under the impression that we are studying similar prob­lems.”151 Like Sorokin, Maslow believed a less detached, more subjective scientific method was necessary to apprehend the psy­chol­ogy of self-­actualizers.152 Among the religious figures in the society, the Swami Akhilananda was prob­ably Sorokin’s closest ally. Born in Bangladesh, Akhilananda joined the Ramakrishna Order of Hinduism and emigrated to Boston in 1926 to help spread Vedanta philosophy (the teachings of the Vedas, the Hindu sacred texts) in the United States. He conducted worship ser­vices at Ramakrishna Vedanta socie­ties in Boston and Providence and became well known to scholars at Harvard, Boston University, and Brown, with whom he shared interests in science and religion and in interfaith dialogue.153 In 1946, the social psychologist Gordon W. Allport and the phi­ los­op ­ her Edgar Sheffield Brightman both contributed forewords to Akhilananda’s Hindu Psy­chol­ogy: Its Meaning for the West, which argued for a reconciliation between Vedanta and Western psy­chol­ogy.154 The Swami wrote to Sorokin a­ fter reading The Reconstruction of Humanity, which the sociologist had dedicated to “the deathless Mohandas K. Gandhi,” and the two thereafter became fast friends.155 Sorokin’s 1950 Explorations in Al­ 138

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truistic Love and Be­hav­ior included an essay by Akhilananda, and the sociologist wrote an introduction to the Swami’s Modern Prob­lems in Reli­ gion (1964).156 When Sorokin was conceiving of his research society, it was Akhilananda and James Houston Shrader, a chemist interested in science and religion, who met with Sorokin at his home in Winchester to discuss the plans.157 The society proved to be a curious mixture of transcendent value and sharp business acumen. While Swami Akhilananda led its members in prayer, Sikorsky was elected its first president, and Moorhead Wright, an executive of General Electric, its vice president.158 Finding funding from business was an ever-­pressing concern, and Sorokin rejected Shrader’s suggestion to invite Montagu to join the board ­because Sorokin doubted the anthropologist’s fund­rais­ing skills.159 On October 4 and 5, 1957, as the first Sputnik blinked across the sky, the society sponsored a conference at MIT titled “New Knowledge in ­Human Values,” which attracted a lineup of prominent scholars.160 Maslow chaired the program committee. More than 1,500 p ­ eople attended over the course of the two days, including hundreds of students, and the proceedings ­were reported in newspapers and on radio. The program noted that Sorokin, the society’s founder, had been saved from the firing squad in Rus­sia in 1918 “through the altruistic action of a former student.” “Man [could] make the earth one morally,” the program proclaimed, could “transmit to all ­peoples new knowledge of the moral laws, and [would] thus enlarge his concept of the moral universe and its creator.”161 The participants believed this to be the fundamental challenge of the twentieth ­century. The conference turned out to be the society’s high-­water mark. Planned to be only the first of many, even as it took place a split had formed in the society’s governance. On the one hand, Sorokin, paired with his good friends Akhilananda and Shrader, wanted to continue with the scientific analy­sis of love and altruism. On the other hand, E. Francis Bowditch (the dean of students at MIT), F. S. C. Northrup (a Yale phi­los­ o­pher), and Maslow proposed a more general pursuit of values in all fields. They envisioned a Center for the Study of ­Human Values, or even more, an Institute for Advanced Studies in ­Human Values, to fulfill in the fields of the humanities the role played by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Prince­ton in the physical sciences.162 Just as MIT taught mastery of facts, Bowditch explained, the proposed institute would teach mastery of values. He recommended high salaries for institute members, “making 139

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them into the aristocrats they actually are.”163 Sorokin was disgusted by such “grandiose plans.” “It became clear to me,” he reported to Shrader, “that the authors already appointed themselves as permanent researchers of the Institute, with fat salaries.”164 Sorokin complained that the institute tried to encompass “the broad field of h ­ uman values—­moral, spiritual, aesthetic, economic. Creative altruism is never mentioned.”165 In June 1958, suffering from a dearth of funds, and fragmented by bickering among its constituents, the Research Society for Creative Altruism ended its existence.166 T ­ hese well-­intentioned men, in their desire to increase the amount of unselfish love in the world, ended up not even being able to get along with each other. The demise of the society did not stop Sorokin’s evangelizing on behalf of the mysterious energy of love. In September 1958, he proclaimed that unselfish love was “one of the highest forms of creative power necessary for the survival of living forms, ­human individuals, and social organ­izations.” If only each person would decrease his hateful emotions and increase loving feelings ­toward all ­human beings, such emotional transformation “could contribute to a lasting peace much more than by all the operations of power politics and armament race.”167 For his part, Montagu continued to argue for the natu­ral cooperation claim into the 1960s and 1970s. He incorporated the findings of Jane Goodall and other primatologists into the argument, claiming in his 1965 The ­Human Revolution that “the deep-­seated nature of the cooperative drives . . . ​bind the members of primate socie­ties together and preserve them.”168 As cooperation, not conflict, was “selectively valued” over the course of h ­ uman evolution, it continued to be essential to ­human functioning to the pre­sent day. The claim for a cooperative drive coexisted— as it had in Montagu’s writings since the 1940s—­with an emphasis on ­human educability and flexibility: “Man,” he concluded, “has developed as a cooperative, loving, intelligent, in­de­pen­dent, instinctless, educable, plastic creature.”169 In his 1971 bestseller Touching, Montagu examined the sensory capacity and “­human significance” of the skin.170 He stressed the importance of breastfeeding—an elemental form of touch—as the key to mother-­infant bonding and ­mother love. The “symbiotic ­union” of ­mother and child, Montagu argued, was the prototype for all other h ­ uman relationships. Without it, the child would be irrevocably damaged, physically, psychologically, and socially. The h ­ uman being was constituted so as to require the giving and receiving of love as a prerequisite to normal func140

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tioning. Loving touch was a basic biological need that persisted throughout life. “The need is universal and everywhere the same, though the form of its satisfaction may vary according to time and place,” Montagu declared—­a clear indication that he saw biological essentialism and cultural conditioning as mutually reinforcing, not mutually exclusive, determinants of be­hav­ior.171 It might seem a long way from mutual aid and cooperative drives to ­mother love and loving touch, but this was exactly the distance that Montagu’s ­career encompassed. From the natu­ral cooperation of the UNESCO Statement, to the love and creative altruism of the Harvard research center, to ­women’s talent for nurture and caring, Montagu carved out a distinctive if embattled niche. Along with Sorokin, he emphasized the social emotions as deep-­seated and biological, representing a return to the body’s own wisdom, and as forces for unity, commonality, and peace, for healing the divisions that civilization and politics had created. In ­these war­time and Cold War de­cades, love and altruism—­and not reason, rationality, or intelligence—­emerged as Montagu’s and Sorokin’s answer to world crisis.172 Conventional scientific c­ areers and traditional scientific disciplines could not contain the descriptive and prescriptive science of ­human nature that ­these two scientists envisioned. But that was so much the worse for academia. The public persona that Montagu in­ ven­ted and the alternative institutions that Sorokin fostered deliberately breached academic bound­aries and represented a rethinking both of science and of its modes of communication. In the 1960s Montagu fashioned the natu­ral cooperation claim into a worthy opponent of Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s aggression instinct: a conception of h ­ uman nature just as biologically determined as theirs, but leading ­human be­hav­ior ­toward love and altruism, not t­ oward vio­lence and territoriality. To Montagu and Sorokin, h ­ uman nature could not have looked more dif­fer­ent from the way it did to the aggressionists. But they shared an under­lying assumption: the reconstruction of humanity and the recovery of humanness in war­time and Cold War contexts depended on the rediscovery and reaffirmation of h ­ uman instincts, drives, and emotions. ­Whether they believed in love or in aggression, t­ hese scientists agreed that re­sis­tance to po­liti­cal threats was to be found in the deep biological substrate of h ­ uman nature. The turn to biological essentialism formed a common bond between other­wise intractable antagonists.

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Aggression Debate Some of the old discoveries of ethology . . . ​have recently become the storm centre of an anthropological controversy. —­Konrad Lorenz, Studies in Animal and ­Human Behaviour

B

y the mid-1960s, two rival views of ­human nature clamored for public attention. The claim that ­human beings w ­ ere instinctually aggressive found its most articulate spokesmen in Lorenz and Ardrey, while Montagu’s writings expressed the opposing view—­that h ­ umans ­were naturally cooperative. Aside from their basic disagreement about the inherent tendency of ­human be­hav­ior, the two views actually had much in common. They agreed that ­there was such a ­thing as “­human nature,” possessing a definable essence and grounded in biological tendencies ­evident throughout the natu­ral and animal worlds. Sharing a dread of communism, they agreed that biologically based conceptions of ­human nature supported h ­ uman individualism and liberty and stood as a bulwark against totalitarian conditioning. According to both views, h ­ uman nature was gendered: t­here was one set of innate tendencies for males and another for females. And the views agreed that professional, elite science, science as conventionally practiced, was totally inadequate to convey ­these messages about h ­ uman nature to a public desperately in need of them. And yet the expositors of t­ hese rival views could not make common cause over their shared assumptions. Although ­earlier in the de­cade Montagu and Ardrey had communed about their experience as pop­u­lar­izers, by 1966 they had lost any pretense of agreement. Instead, they battled. For ten years, from 1966, when Ardrey’s Territorial Imperative and Lorenz’s On Aggression w ­ ere published within months of each other, to 1976, when Montagu had his last word on innate aggression, a debate raged over ­whether ­there was a ­human killer instinct or not. It was not a literal 142

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debate—­the antagonists never met in person to hash out their dispute—­but rather a war of the printed word, in which competing publications appeared in rapid succession and took aim at each other. However remotely conducted, the debate was vituperative and bitterly personal. The antagonists not only hated each other’s ideas, they despised each other as ­people, and insult mingled freely in their writings with critique. The debate started when Ardrey attacked Montagu in the first chapter of Territorial Imperative.1 The book portrayed Montagu in a distinctive way. Ardrey made no reference to Montagu’s hypothesis about natu­ral cooperation; he failed entirely to acknowledge even the existence of Montagu’s rival vision of a biologically based h ­ uman nature. Instead, he depicted Montagu as an extreme environmentalist, a cultural anthropologist trained by Franz Boas who, like his teacher, insisted that be­hav­ior was ­shaped by external circumstance, lacked any biological tendencies or directives, and was unconnected to the animal world. Just as Lorenz caricatured his critics as “behaviorists,” Ardrey also treated Montagu as a believer in the blank slate and as such a perfect repre­sen­ta­tion of all that was wrong with American social science.2 This deliberate misreading became characteristic of the debate, and the caricature stuck, in part ­because it was so consistently employed. For Ardrey, as for Lorenz, the charges of “environmentalism” and “behaviorism” became the stock reply to critics. With his high public profile and media presence, Montagu was in a good position to respond to Ardrey’s attack. He also knew he could not do ­battle singlehandedly but needed allies, and his allies of the 1950s, namely Sorokin, w ­ ere no longer by his side. Montagu set out to forge a new co­ali­tion of critics: ethologists, psychologists, and anthropologists, some of whom w ­ ere also distinguished as popu­lar authors. Montagu himself selected the members of this co­ali­tion and tried to keep them focused on the task at hand. He collected and edited their critical reviews of Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s books in a volume called Man and Aggression, which appeared in 1968 and was expanded and updated in 1973. Montagu also wrote his own single-­authored reply to the aggressionists in 1976. The war of books was on. In Montagu’s writings, however, an odd ­thing happened. Instead of using his own view of ­human nature—as inherently driven ­toward co­ operation and love—to oppose the aggressionists, Montagu argued against instincts altogether: “Man is man b ­ ecause he has no instincts,” he confidently proclaimed in the pages of Man and Aggression.3 Perhaps he was 143

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afraid that his notion of a cooperative drive could be too easily conflated with an instinct; perhaps he was leery of admitting too g­ reat a role for biology lest his opponents perceive it as a concession. For what­ever reason, in his anti-­aggressionist writings, the cooperative drive failed to make an appearance—­even though in his other works at the same time, such as Touching and the successive editions of Natu­ral Superiority of ­Women—­natu­ral tendencies ­toward love and nurture ­were as pre­sent as ever. In effect, Montagu allowed his opponents to define him. A rich and storied tradition in American biology—­built around the belief in natu­ral cooperation—­thus became, at least within the arena of the aggression debate, eclipsed. The redefinition of Montagu’s position had decisive implications for the aggression debate. Rather than a debate between competing views of ­human nature—­rival essentialisms—in which the antagonists could agree on certain basic assumptions, it became a conflict between extremes, in which the antagonists could agree on nothing. Montagu became, both in portrayals as well as in his own writings, an “extreme environmentalist,” while Lorenz and Ardrey w ­ ere portrayed as ge­ne­tic determinists, allowing no room whatsoever for learning or experience to shape be­hav­ior. Despite their protestations, Montagu accused them of neglecting environment altogether. As nuances and subtleties of the positions ­were lost, both sides also acquired crude po­liti­cal overlays. The biology-­denying Montagu, in his apparent hunger for behavioral engineering, was portrayed as an apologist for communism, while the hereditarian aggressionists became racists, fascists, and social Darwinists. Partly accurate, partly caricature, the portrayals proved power­ful in shaping the debate into a simplified but memorable form: the right wing versus the left wing, nature versus nurture. No m ­ atter how much the opponents decried the dichotomy as false and outmoded, they per­sis­tently represented each other in ­these polarized terms. Trading barbs for ten years left the two sides just as intransigently opposed and polarized as ever. The aggression debate thus neither reached resolution nor produced a “winner.” It did, however, have a result. By the mid-1970s, the h ­ uman nature tradition—­the conception of man—­that had once been capacious enough to contain both Lorenz and Montagu, both aggressionists and cooperationists, lay in ruins.4 The common platform on which both sides had once stood was shattered. In its place a stark nature / nurture dichotomy took center stage.

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Rapturous Reception On Aggression and The Territorial Imperative vaulted to popularity in the midst of a de­cade in which vio­lence had become an American national obsession. The trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, documented by Hannah Arendt in the New Yorker, turned a spotlight on the boundless h ­ uman capacity for evil. Soviet and American tanks standing muzzle to muzzle at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin presaged the outbreak of World War III, while the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. The assassinations of John  F. Kennedy and Malcolm X stunned the public. Operation Rolling Thunder escalated the fighting in Vietnam into a bombing campaign in the north, a move that turned the tide of American public opinion against the war, while the Watts riots exposed raw racial divisions in south-­central Los Angeles. In a potent symbol of the indifference to suffering wrought by urban life, Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in New York City while onlookers reportedly ignored her screams for help. The concurrency of t­ hese events—­they all occurred between 1961 and 1965—­compelled some observers to view them as aspects of a single ­human phenomenon: aggression. Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s books spoke directly to this moment. “This could be the most impor­tant book in the world for our times” announced a full-­page ad for The Territorial Imperative in the New York Times on September 27, 1966—­the same week the book appeared as number nine on the bestseller list. The many glowing reviews that the books received emphasized and amplified their po­liti­cal relevance. The New Yorker proposed to “rewrite the history of the breathtaking Kennedy-­Khrushchev contest over the Cuban Missiles in terms of Lorenz’s description of the territorial contests of male cichlid fishes.”5 Both the Saturday Review and the New Republic explained American failures in Vietnam in terms of the territorial imperative.6 The Saturday Review declared that Ardrey’s book deserved as wide an audience as pos­si­ble,” and the New York Times Book Review hoped On Aggression “­will be read by psychologists, generals, politicians, and all sorts of ­people.”7 Domestic events as well as foreign gave “credibility to Ardrey’s hypothesis of the ‘territorial imperative,’ ” the New Republic asserted. When Martin Luther King led a march in Chicago in the summer of 1966 to demand open housing—­that properties be rented and sold in all-­white neighborhoods on a nondiscriminatory basis—­a white mob rioted and stoned him and his followers. The review used pop ethology to argue that 145

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King’s march was counterproductive ­because it opposed the order of nature. “Are not the vicious responses of whites the predictable reply, given Ardrey’s thesis?”8 By holding an animal mirror up to the h ­ uman world, reviews like t­ hese pushed the Lorenz-­Ardrey thesis in directions its authors ­hadn’t developed (or possibly even yet i­ magined) and helped to do their work for them. The reviews repeated the claim, prominent in the Lorenz and Ardrey books, that the social sciences denied the influence of biology on ­human be­hav­ior. The London Observer described the rise of ethology as having “the exhilarating effect of a March breeze rattling against the tightly shut win­dows of American Behaviourism,” as the environmentalist “orthodoxy” was at last being shaken by the new biological “heresy.”9 The Atlantic also counterposed ethology to behaviorism: the social and psychological sciences held that “man was a creature of his environment,” conditioning and learning making him what he was, with no room in the picture for instincts.10 Harper’s represented Montagu as the quin­tes­sen­ tial environmental extremist, his contention that aggression and vio­ lence must be learned “the antithesis of all that Lorenz and Ardrey have to say.”11 The Journal of Conflict Resolution thanked Ardrey for pointing out the inadequacy of a phrase that had long annoyed the reviewer: “that of Ashley Montagu to the effect that ‘man has lost virtually all of his instincts.’ ”12 The reviewers ­were convinced that this environmentalist, biology-­ denying, “behaviorist” view was about to suffer imminent defeat at the hands of the ethologists. A new conception of man was about to break into popu­lar consciousness, and the reviews gave the pervasive sense of being poised on the verge of a major departure in h ­ uman self-­understanding. The New Yorker admitted that the argument over man’s animal heritage “is just beginning,” but predicted that the ethologists would prevail.13 The Journal of Conflict Resolution reiterated Ardrey’s language of “revolution,” delayed thus far by the “censorship of scientific orthodoxy.”14 Adopting the soteriological language of the Lorenzians, Harper’s called biology “the new salvation of man,” for it was only by admitting that he was an animal that man could be saved.15 “Textbooks in po­liti­cal science, sociology, and psy­chol­ogy are g­ oing to have to be rewritten,” the Saturday Review crowed.16 For ­these reviewers, it was not the preponderance of evidence that swayed them to the aggressionists’ side; it was rather a conviction that Lorenz and Ardrey had to be right, that their message was too impor­ tant for the ­future of humanity not to be heard. 146

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Criticism, when it was expressed, was muted lest it drown out the urgent h ­ uman message of the books. The reviews implied that the details could always be corrected or filled in ­later. This was the case regardless of ­whether the outlet was a popu­lar magazine or newspaper, or more specialized journal, w ­ hether the reviewer was a scientist or a layman. The Na­ tional Review lauded The Territorial Imperative as “full of news, the rarest ­thing one can say of a book,” and if the book was “confusing . . . ​the confusion comes from exuberance and scope.”17 Time called Ardrey’s belief in a ­human territorial imperative “indigestible and undemonstrable,” and said that the scientific community “stood aghast at his scientific methodology.” Nevertheless, the review continued, Ardrey supplied “plenty to think about,” an “exhilarating adventure,” and a “valuable if treacherous bridge for the stimulated reader who wants to gain more reliable anthropological ground.”18 The New York Times Book Review called Ardrey “a Calvinist resurrected in modern guise” who “believes in original sin: our trou­bles are written in our genes”—an argument the reviewer called “simplistic.” Yet the review also said that Ardrey “has written a provocative book that mirrors and expresses the self-­doubt of a hard and violent time.”19 And the editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a­ fter making two minor criticisms of On Aggression, wrote in an “open letter” to Lorenz: “Forgive me ­these critical musings. Yours is a timely, impor­tant, and beautiful book. All ­those concerned with the origin and ­future of conflict and war in ­human affairs should read it.”20 Scientists who might have been expected to be critical of Lorenz instead mixed cele­bration in with their critiques.21 In a detailed and positive review in Redbook, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who maintained an improbable friendship with Lorenz, introduced him as “a g­ reat naturalist” and “a pioneer in modern experimental biology.” Mead explicated Lorenz’s theories of instinct and ritualization, of aggression and bonding be­hav­ior, and of the dangers that lay in overcrowding. She took Lorenz to task for neglecting culture in his discussion of war, arguing that its solution lay not in rechanneling individual aggression, but in creation of institutions and a “world climate of opinion” to support peace. In her last paragraph, however, Mead praised Lorenz as “a ­great naturalist . . . ​ [who] has laid the foundation for a way of thinking about ­human aggression within the ­whole natu­ral world.” His book was full of “vivid details” to which the reader would turn “with delight and fascination—­and laughter.”22 147

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Niko Tinbergen, who elsewhere criticized Lorenz on scientific ­matters, defended his fellow ethologist’s popu­lar stance. Lorenz’s hypothesis about the evolution and function of aggression was “fundamentally correct,” Tinbergen asserted in his review of On Aggression. “It would be deplorable if this product of unrivalled knowledge and rare intuition [­were] accepted as merely just another in­ter­est­ing story about animal be­ hav­ior”; rather, “it ­ought to wake us up” to the likelihood that ethology was the key to controlling h ­ uman aggression.23 According to the reviews, the books not only made accessible a new and revolutionary science of be­hav­ior. Lorenz and Ardrey also presented a message of dire social importance.

Nailing Jelly to the Wall Montagu was appalled by the pop ethologists’ rapturous reception. T ­ here had been no lack of criticism of their claims: since the early 1950s, ethologists had been taking aim at Lorenz’s instinct theory, and Montagu himself had denounced Ardrey’s African Genesis and its depiction of man as killer.24 But critiques lobbed against Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s e­ arlier work seemed powerless to stem the latest popu­lar tide. The nearly coincident appearance of ­these two new books—­each echoing and reinforcing the other—­created a phenomenon unlike anything Montagu had ever seen before, and he watched in alarm as skepticism and doubt ­were swept aside in a g­ reat onrush of media adulation. “Where you go wrong,” he chided the be­hav­ior ge­ne­ticist John Paul Scott, a fellow critic of innate aggression, “is in the assumption that Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s views w ­ ill be quietly forgotten. They w ­ on’t be.”25 Montagu penned negative reviews of the books, but he quickly realized that this was more than a one-­man job. Opposition had to be mustered, the critics or­ga­nized, and Lorenz and Ardrey confronted on their own popu­lar terms. Montagu was well aware that the pop ethologists made a slippery target. If one criticized their evidence, they retreated to their “­human message.” If one called out the playwright Ardrey for lacking scientific credentials, Lorenz’s professional prestige flew to the rescue. To combat his opponents and their rapturous reception, Montagu had to find critical reviews, serious but accessible, that neither treated Ardrey as beneath contempt nor held Lorenz as above reproach. Decrying the “singularly ­little opposition,” Montagu lamented that “the knowledgeable ­people ­won’t bother and the fringe p ­ eople ­don’t know and the layman is greatly 148

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relieved of his burden of guilt and so he likes the ideas enormously.”26 The combination of overwhelmingly positive reviews and gullible, vulnerable readers made the need for an or­ga­nized critical response all the more pressing. “Scientists Oppose Man-­Is-­Bad View,” the New York Times headline blared: “Montagu in Group Criticizing Lorenz-­Ardrey Pessimism.”27 When it appeared in September 1968, Man and Aggression included fifteen negative reviews—­most of which had been previously published—­ selected, edited, and with an introduction by Montagu. The contributors ­were a distinguished lot drawn from both biology and the social sciences. Anthropologists constituted the largest subset. John Beatty and Omer Stewart w ­ ere experts on the Ute Indians, Lorenz’s key ethnographic case study of a tribe supposedly overflowing with aggression. Ralph Holloway had studied the Australopithecus skull from Taungs that Raymond Dart had identified; Marshall Sahlins was an ethnographer of the South Pacific and an antiwar activist. Edmund Leach, who specialized in Burmese culture, and Geoffrey Gorer, in Japa­nese character structure, w ­ ere anthropologists who regularly wrote for broad popu­lar audiences. The contributors also included the zoologist Samuel A. Barnett, a student of rat be­ hav­ ior; the economist, pacifist, poet, and phi­ los­ o­ pher Kenneth Boulding; the be­hav­ior ge­ne­ticist John Paul Scott, author of his own book on the environmental c­ auses of aggression; the naturalist and best-­selling author Sally Carrighar; the ethologist and Zen Buddhist practitioner John Hurrell Crook; the ant be­hav­ior expert T. C. Schneirla; and the anatomist Sir Solly Zuckerman. In order to confront the aggressionists on their own popu­lar terms, Montagu drew most of the reviews from mass circulation venues—­the New York Times Magazine, Encounter, the New York Review of Books, the Nation—­and widely read science magazines—­Nature, Natu­ral History, and Scientific American. Boulding’s review came from the War / Peace Report, the magazine of a New York–­based Quaker group.28 Only two of the reviews appeared in more specialized outlets: Holloway’s was published in Po­liti­cal Science Quarterly; and Sahlins contributed a play satirizing Af­ rican Genesis that originally appeared in an anthropological society journal. Three papers had been specially prepared for Montagu’s volume: Stewart and Beatty each took issue with Lorenz’s portrait of the Utes, and Crook made a detailed critique of the concept of territorial aggression. Montagu’s own contribution was repurposed from his 1965 book The ­Human Revolution. 149

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Montagu’s volume was notable too for whom he chose not to include. The psychologist B. F. Skinner, who spoke critically of Lorenz and Ardrey in a 1966 article, was con­spic­u­ous by his absence; Montagu did not run the risk of including a bona fide behaviorist among his allies.29 Fredric Wertham, the psychiatrist who argued that vio­lence was caused by violent media, especially movies and comic books, and not by any innate tendency, was also missing; Montagu might have seen him as insufficiently versed in the ethological evidence.30 Margaret Mead, who might have been expected to support Montagu’s side but instead defended Lorenz’s views, was quite deliberately excluded.31 Montagu was galled that in her Redbook review Mead had “highly praised” On Aggression. He found her treatment oddly un­balanced, overly focusing on Lorenz’s animal work and dismissing his ­human claims in a final brief paragraph. “­There is some skullduggery ­here, at the expense of investigative science,” Montagu grumbled to Schneirla.32 For Montagu, the defection of a fellow anthropologist to Lorenz’s side could only have seemed a betrayal.33 The contributors to the volume aimed both to criticize Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s claims and also to explain their popularity. For Montagu the pop ethologists’ mass appeal stemmed from their prophetic soteriology, the redemptive message they offered to a world gone wrong. They “sanctioned” the vio­lence that man was capable of learning. He peppered his comments with theological terms: in their “new litany of innate depravity,” Lorenz and Ardrey posed as “­father confessors” who w ­ ere “welcomed with all the fervor of a sinner seeking absolution for his sins.” Instinct was a “doctrine,” and the notion of innate aggression man’s “original sin.” The bewildered “layman” had to be protected from ­these “false prophets” and set right by the real experts—­none other than Montagu himself and his allies.34 John Hurrell Crook, the ethologist, attributed Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s popularity to the growth of the paperback book industry in the 1960s. The Lorenz and Ardrey books represented a new genre of science popularization, massively distributed and reaching “a huge body of attentive readers.” “Mass literacy provides a market for mass products” on an unpre­ce­dented scale, as Crook put it. The books ­were new, too, for their literary flair, entertainment value, and persuasive power. “The new product, burnished and furnished with all the artifice skilled authorship can employ, seeks the s­ imple statement, the dramatic story, and, above all, an essentially sensational account of ­human trou­bles that . . . ​relieves the anxiety” about our disordered world. But the books could not simply be 150

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dismissed as “kitsch.”35 Ardrey’s wide reading and research ­were evident in them, and he picked up on trends ­toward biological explanation in the social sciences. Crook and Sahlins both recognized that a key part of Ardrey’s popu­lar appeal was his demo­cratic view of science. Unlike traditional popularizations, in which a recognized authority instructs the lay public, Ardrey’s books contained a subversive message, a critique of conventional science that Crook acknowledged and perhaps even appreciated: “[Ardrey] portrays too with vivid pen . . . ​the often narrow-­minded conformity of practising scientists—­a picture of a community of men often far from flattering. For the general reader t­ here is much h ­ ere to relish and enjoy.”36 Ardrey’s pop­u­lism, his reversal of hierarchies of expertise, reinforced by his authorial persona, was h ­ ere perceived as power­ful and successful strategy to win over lay audiences.

The Aggression Debate, Round One, 1968 If aggressionists and cooperationists had once stood on a common platform of shared assumptions, Montagu dismantled that platform plank by plank in his contributions to Man and Aggression. The first shared assumption that he sacrificed was the notion of ­human nature itself as possessing definable predispositions. “The ­human being is entirely instinctless,” Montagu asserted in his contributions to the volume: ­human nature was now marked by its flexibility, its openness to development through education and experience. He did not mean to deny all biological influence, just the Lorenzian concept of instinct, but in the heat of the debate this subtlety was lost. Montagu made no mention of the cooperative drive, and in his portrayal, ­humans even lacked tendencies in any one definite direction: “Given man’s unique educability, h ­ uman nature is what man learns to become as a ­human being.” Absent was any assertion of the capacity to love as biologically inbuilt. Montagu emphasized the importance of “cooperative activities,” but the implication was that the be­hav­ior held social or cultural importance, and t­ here was no inkling of its stemming from a biological drive.37 The first plank of the shared platform—­biological essentialism—­was gone. As he pulled back from biologically based ­human nature, Montagu also removed ­humans from the animal world. Lorenz and Ardrey, he argued, both suffered from “the same fatal defect, namely, extrapolation from other animals to man,” but such extrapolation was insupportable. 151

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Where the Lorenzians had i­ magined a seamless transition, Montagu now inserted an unbridgeable chasm. “Arguments based on fish, birds, and other animals are strictly for them,” Montagu declared. “They have no relevance for man.”38 The anthropologist had himself once relied on analogies to other animals to make the case for natu­ral cooperation, but now he refused the validity of all such analogies. Animals operated by instinct, but ­humans functioned through learning. “The notable t­hing about ­human be­hav­ior is that it is learned. . . . ​From any dominance of biologically or inherited predetermined reactions that may prevail in the be­ hav­ior of other animals, man has moved into a zone of adaptation in which his be­hav­ior is dominated by learned responses.” With a rhetorical flourish, he added, “If anyone has any evidence to the contrary, let him bring it forth.”39 A critical attitude ­toward conventional, professionalized science, and t­ oward scientific norms of detachment and objectivity, had been another plank of the common platform. The science of ­human nature had had a normative aspect: the natu­ral world possessed tendencies that pointed the way t­ oward what was right and good for ­human be­hav­ior. Fact was intimately linked with value, w ­ hether one believed in natu­ral cooperation or innate aggression. Now, however, in his contributions to the 1968 volume, Montagu castigated his opponents for failing to keep fact apart from interpretation and for being more enamored of their pet theory than of evidence. Where once the anthropologist had based a new postracial world order in the notion of cooperative ­human nature, he now sounded like the most naive of positivists as he segregated facts from values and instructed his readers on the inductive pro­gress of science. “A scientist is not interested in proving or in disproving theories, in believing or in disbelieving, but in discovering what is” and not declaiming on what ­ought to be.40 Grounding science in replicable fact, Montagu excoriated the Lorenzians for transgressing its proper bounds. The common platform had once also supported a defense of democracy and liberalism. Ardrey envisioned man’s biological nature as providing a bulwark against totalitarian menace, and Lorenz’s theory of aggression, in offering alternatives to war, had pacifist leanings: beliefs similar to Montagu’s own. But now Montagu smashed any pretense of shared politics. The thesis of “innate depravity,” Montagu revealed, was actually a deeply conservative, pro–­status quo, militaristic doctrine. So retrograde was it that it justified nineteenth-­century social Darwinism all over again, resurrecting such notions as “survival of the fittest” and 152

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“the strug­gle for existence.” In explaining aggression as the outcome of an instinct, Lorenz and Ardrey rationalized it and made it seem inevitable and unavoidable—­nothing less than a justification for war. Their theory was not only “unsound” but “dangerous”: even apart from its offenses against scientific method, the theory’s potential social harm was reason enough to reject it out of hand.41 Each of Montagu’s criticisms reverberated throughout the other essays in the 1968 volume. Man was instinctless and culture-­shaped, and an unbridgeable gap separated man from animals; the rules of proper science (especially as broken by Ardrey) had to be reaffirmed; and a dangerous and conservative politics lay implicit in Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s books. According to the economist Boulding, “man has virtually no instincts and . . . ​virtually every­thing he knows has to be learned from his environment.” 42 ­Human use of language, the anthropologist Leach asserted, “has completely altered our nature” away from the animals’ fixity of response. Our customs and expressions w ­ ere unlimited and could not be “readily understood by ­simple analogy to the habits of the prairie­dog.” 43 The appearance of similarity that the ethologists created was based on nothing but a circularity of argument: they applied ­human descriptors, such as “aggressive,” to animals, then reversed the pro­cess, claiming that “animal aggression” could tell us something about h ­ uman. This was just “word-­play,” Leach argued—­a “verbal conjuring trick.” 44 Gorer disputed Ardrey’s use of the same term—­“war”—­for encounters between “primitive bands” and between nation-­states. Territory was a “word of multiple meanings” and ­human terms like “nation” and “society” could not apply to animals.45 The zoologist Barnett titled his review “On the ­Hazards of Analogies” and criticized Lorenz for his “use of colloquial language.” 46 For t­ hese critics, Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s tricky use of words and sleight of hand concealed the incommensurability between animal and ­human. The assertion of animal-­human equivalence, presented as homology, was revealed to be analogy, and a very flimsy one at that, balanced precariously on a disingenuous use of words. The volume did not, however, pre­sent a united front, as disagreement surfaced about the best strategy to take on the aggressionists. Some of the critics, particularly Schneirla and Crook, both ethologists themselves, questioned Lorenz’s claims within his own specialty. Schneirla condemned Lorenz’s neglect of the pro­cess of development, just as Daniel Lehrman, Schneirla’s student, had in his 1953 criticism. Crook argued that territorial be­hav­ior was much more complex and variable than the 153

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­Lorenzians believed.47 But not all the critics took this tack against Lorenz. ­Others deployed a dif­fer­ent strategy, portraying the ethologist as a real scientist whose authority was unassailable as long as he did not stray into the forbidden zones beyond his own specialty. Ardrey, by contrast, was depicted as a pop­u­lar­izer, a playwright completely out of his depth and lacking legitimacy altogether.48 For Carrighar, a naturalist and bestselling popu­lar writer herself, Ardrey was “not a biologist,” and he simply “misjudged the emphasis that professionals put on territorial aggression.” Lorenz, on the other hand, was an “ethologist of world repute,” but his expertise was confined to “tamed” animals, captives in a ­human environment, a “domestic garden,” which consequently heightened their aggression.49 For Scott, Lorenz was “a very narrow specialist” while Ardrey’s Territorial Imperative was “good theater” but “third rate science reporting.”50 For Boulding, Lorenz was a “very distinguished Austrian ethologist,” while Ardrey was a “playwright,” “moralist,” and “pop­u­lar­izer.”51 Leach went so far as to claim that the messages of Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s books w ­ ere actually “diametrically opposed”: the “modest and wise” Lorenz took the optimistic view that man is basically harmless, aggression was only a “so called evil,” and salvation would come from the h ­ uman capacity for brotherly love. Meanwhile Ardrey, “noisy and foolish,” pessimistically emphasized the territorial “killing propensity” in man.52 The tactic of cordoning off Ardrey from the professional scientists, of teasing the aggressionists apart and assigning them to dif­fer­ent realms, had the ironic effects of rendering Lorenz’s contributions to his own specialty immune from criticism and of relegating popularization to its low-­ status position. If Lorenz’s expertise in his own narrow field could not be assailed, the question turned from the legitimacy of ethology as a discipline to its relevance for the ­human condition. ­Here the social scientists could assert their own authority. Once the ethologist was out of his ele­ ment, his ability to speak knowledgeably could be doubted. The divide-­and-­conquer tactic reinforced Montagu’s image of science as fact-­based and separate from values and helped to reassert the bound­aries of proper science. At the same time, however, ­these critics’ willingness to shield and protect Lorenz’s expertise conflicted with Schneirla’s and Crook’s direct scientific assault on the ethologist. The dif­ fer­ent strategies w ­ ere not readily reconcilable and revealed some fault lines in the supposedly united front that Montagu sought to pre­sent in his volume. Reviewers took note: one remarked that the book “must be read 154

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as polemic, and confusing polemic at that, for the contributors are far from consistent.”53 As the debate progressed, such fault lines only deepened. Divisions among the critics became a characteristic feature of the opposition to pop ethology. For many of the critics, as for Montagu, it was the Lorenzians’ position on h ­ uman instincts and h ­ uman aggression that loomed most threateningly, since it supposedly concealed a conservative, pro-­war politics. The contributors, at least in 1968, s­ topped short of labeling the two authors conservatives themselves, but their books ­were certainly deemed dangerous: the pro-­instinct position had dire consequences for society. Gorer represented Ardrey’s “categories and preferences . . . ​[as] bound to give comfort and provide ammunition for the Radical Right,” though Gorer admitted ­there was no evidence that Ardrey himself held such views.54 For Boulding, On Aggression and The Territorial Imperative “met an ideological need,” especially in the United States, to quell “the moral uneasiness about napalm and the massacre of the innocent in Vietnam.”55 Holloway agreed: “In short, this book [Territorial Imperative] is an apology and rationalization for Imperialism, Pax Americana, Laissez-­Faire, Social Darwinism, and that greatest of all evolutionary developments, Capitalism.”56 On this interpretation, pop ethology should be assessed po­liti­ cally and could be rejected on po­liti­cal grounds alone, regardless of its claims to scientific legitimacy. Montagu wrestled with the bound­aries of this po­liti­cal critique. He was acutely aware of Lorenz’s Nazi past and could easily have used it to make the charges of fascism, racism, and militarism stick. But he and the other contributors hesitated to mix direct po­liti­cal accusations into a “scientific” debate. Man and Aggression made only a few oblique references to the Nazis, all of which absolved Lorenz and Ardrey of evil intent. As Boulding put it, “We have seen in the Nazi movement how appallingly dangerous a pseudo-­science can be in the legitimation of an absurd and evil system,” but “I am not suggesting that ­either Lorenz or Ardrey is a racist theorist like Gobineau or Houston Chamberlain. . . . ​Dr. Lorenz, I am sure, who is a gentle, humane soul, living in the afterglow of Franz Josef, would be horrified by this suggestion.” “Even Ardrey” was surely “a decent fellow at heart, and . . . ​on the side of man.”57 In planning the volume, Montagu and his coauthors trod this high ground deliberately. Scientific critique, and even po­liti­cal critique, of their opponents’ ideas ­were within the bounds of public “scientific debate,” but personal attacks ­were not. 155

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Privately, however, Montagu and his interlocutors circulated evidence of their opponents’ tarnished histories. “Ardrey is a bad case,” Montagu wrote to Leach in April 1967. “He lived for six years in South Africa, married a South African actress, and from one brief conversation with them both, I gathered they w ­ ere both in sympathy with apartheid. As for Lorenz, I understand that he was not unsympathetic to the Nazi cause during the terrible genocidal activities of the Austrians during World War II.”58 Schneirla supplied Montagu with some specifics: “Years ago, as you may know, just before WWII, Lorenz wrote two (or more) very racialist articles for German journals, attempting to justify ­human racialist attitudes. . . . ​­There is no evidence that he has abandoned this line of thinking, or changed it materially.”59 Montagu responded: “Yes, I had heard that Lorenz behaved badly during the Nazi occupation of Austria. . . . ​Ardrey is an out-­and-­out racist, believes in apartheid, but keeps quiet.” 60 Schneirla agreed (“I firmly believe that Lorenz is a po­liti­cal fanatic who has few scientific scruples”), but he cautioned Montagu to remain above board: “I also realize that he c­ an’t be condemned too flatly too much of the time in a book of this sort or h ­ e’ll gain a lot of new sympathizers.” 61 The other contributors combined this sober public stance with a gleeful private curiosity. Barnett wrote to Montagu, “I am inclined to agree with you that Lorenz’s murky po­liti­cal past should not be mentioned. T ­ here is, however, an enormous long paper by him in one of the German scientific journals . . . ​which includes what seems to be a racist passage.” 62 Montagu did not find taking the high ground to be an easy choice, as was made clear in an undated note he scribbled to himself: “­Shall I discuss ideological backgrounds of innate aggressionists? Or do it in a way that makes no reference to ­those backgrounds?” 63 For now, at least, the rules of scientific debate kept such personal predilections firmly out of sight. Despite or perhaps ­because of the controversy that surrounded them, the pop ethologists’ presence in popu­lar media remained undimmed. A long and celebratory profile of Lorenz appeared in the New Yorker in March 1969, and interviews in the New York Times followed.64 Even more alarming from Montagu’s perspective was the arrival of a new exponent on the scene. Desmond Morris, an ethologist trained by Tinbergen at Oxford, parlayed his experience making highly popu­lar animal be­hav­ior films and TV programs into a book on “the ­human animal.” In The Naked Ape, Morris sounded the Lorenzian theme of a beast within: 156

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“The fundamental patterns of be­hav­ior laid down in our early days as hunting apes still shine through all our affairs,” he wrote, “no m ­ atter how lofty they may be.” 65 Humanity’s animal ancestry was power­ful and ever pre­sent, lurking just below the surface of modern daily life. Morris took the wide and varied range of ­human be­hav­iors—­from sexuality and practices of childrearing to the design of cars and cities to work habits and small talk—­and fit them into “basic” categories common to all the other primates—­“fighting,” “feeding,” “comfort”—­arguing that ­humans needed to acknowledge and submit to the “limits” that biology imposed. “If we do not,” Morris warned in Lorenzian fashion, “then our suppressed biological urges w ­ ill build up u ­ ntil the dam bursts and the ­whole of our elaborate existence is swept away in the flood.” 66 The book aimed to be just as popu­lar as its pre­de­ces­sors. “I suppose you know that Morris has received 150,000 pounds for the En­glish newspaper rights,” Montagu fretted to Crook, “while in the United States the book was a Book of the Month Club se­lection, is being serialized in Life, and I understand an option has been taken for the film rights!” 67 By the time Man and Aggression was published, the psychiatrist Anthony Storr in his 1968 ­Human Aggression had also added his voice to the Lorenzian chorus. With the new books by Morris and Storr, Montagu feared that, despite his best endeavor, the hydra of pop ethology had sprung two more heads.

A Ready Resource for an Urgent Prob­lem Meanwhile, the discourse of pop ethology spread well beyond the confines of the aggression debate. Just as the reviews of Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s books had recommended, ethological arguments became a ready and relevant resource for American policymakers facing what they perceived as an epidemic of vio­lence. ­These policymaking discussions did not always cite or refer directly to the pop ethologists and their books. They did, however, share basic claims with the ethologists: that aggression was a prob­lem originating in ­human nature, not stemming solely from the external and structural features of society. As a result, the policymakers tended to ­favor approaches that zeroed in on the individual and his be­ hav­ior rather than social and po­liti­cal solutions. Following the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson created the National Commission on the C ­ auses and Prevention of Vio­lence. Vio­lence in the United States “has risen to alarmingly high levels,” the commission’s ­report 157

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asserted. “The de­cade of the 1960s was considerably more violent than the several de­cades preceding it and among the most violent in our history.” 68 The commission took a broad purview, encompassing not just individual vio­lence, assassinations, and violent crime (hom­ic­ ide, rape, robbery), but also “group vio­lence,” including civil disobedience, student protests, and seizure of university buildings, as well as segregationist demonstrations and clashes. Since the “ghetto slum,” the report claimed, was where most vio­lence occurred—an area characterized by high proportions of single males, mostly young, poor, and Black, and “working ­mothers”—­this was the area to be targeted.69 However diverse the types of vio­lence it addressed, the commission considered them all as variations on a single theme, aspects of a more basic phenomenon, traceable to a few “basic c­ auses.” T ­ hese c­ auses ­were not only social and political—­“haphazard urbanization, racial discrimination, disfiguring of the environment”—­but also, notably, psychological: “The dislocation of ­human identity and motivation created by an affluent society.”70 The commission included a psychiatrist (Walter Menninger) in addition to judges, ­lawyers, and politicians, and called for a “Council of Social Advisers”—­social scientists recruited to inform government policy. As the pop ethologists also did, the report suggested that policymakers look within the individual for the wellsprings of vio­lence. Discussions like t­ hese fed back into the pop ethologists’ own media appearances. In an interview with Pent­house magazine, Ardrey claimed that the b ­ attles between gangs in the “black ghetto” w ­ ere “as perfect a recapitulation of animal be­hav­ior as any you can find.” Like the “howling monkey,” the street gang defended its turf by instinct; the solution to vio­ lence and crime in the inner cities—­the very prob­lem absorbing the National Vio­lence Commission—­was not to further “de-­territorialize” man, but to acknowledge and accommodate his ancient urges.71 Shared assumptions and claims circulated easily between popu­lar media and policy: vio­lence should be seen in racial terms, as a prob­lem stemming from ­human nature, upon which structural change alone would have only a ­limited impact. Foreign as well as domestic policy came u ­ nder ethological interpretation. In 1969, Senator William J. Fulbright, Demo­crat of Arkansas and chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, held hearings on “psychological aspects” of foreign policy.72 Fulbright invited the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Edward  T. Hall and the psychiatrist Karl Menninger (Walter’s b ­ rother) to “offer insights into our own mo158

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tives and be­hav­ior.” As the National Vio­lence Commission had for vio­ lence on the domestic front, Fulbright saw ­human nature as the clue to crack the prob­lem of war as well. “It is believed by many,” Fulbright declared, “that wars begin in the minds of men. As a politician I am inclined to view it that the mysteries of po­liti­cal be­hav­ior have their origins in the mysteries of the h ­ uman mind,” and yet po­liti­cal leaders had not turned to experts in the h ­ uman mind to understand po­liti­cal be­hav­ior. “It may be that we are frightened by the possibilities that may be revealed by some self-­examination.”73 Nonetheless, Fulbright argued, the time to bring in such expertise was now. At the foreign policy hearings, Fulbright recalled having put an article in the Congressional Rec­ord “concerning the ways seagulls wage fights. Did you ever observe the way seagulls wage fights?” the senator asked his bemused guests. “They have a very elaborate ritual, a highly civilized one, one that we could learn much from if we had sense enough to follow their procedures.” Taking a page directly from Lorenz, Fulbright observed that seagulls, indeed, most animals, seemed to be more civilized than h ­ umans. Throughout the hearings, Fulbright returned to the lessons of the pop ethologists, despite the anthropologists’ pleas for skepticism. “If we assume,” the senator reasoned, “that men are inherently aggressive in their tendency . . . ​of using military force, physical force, to solve prob­lems, . . . ​it certainly makes a g­ reat deal of difference in one’s attitude ­toward current prob­lems.” While Mead warned that explaining be­hav­ior by “some kind of instinctive development millions of years ago” was “very dangerous,” Fulbright remained unmoved by her argument.74 By the early 1970s, it seemed to some observers that the killer instinct, and the justifications for war based on it, had permeated the highest policymaking echelons. Richard J. Barnet, cofounder of the left-­leaning Institute for Policy Studies, deplored the “apologists of American policy [who] justify permanent war by invoking pop anthropology, the view that militarism is a biologically determined aspect of the ­human condition.”75 Barnet himself looked for external, not internal, ­causes of war: wars ­were pursued not b ­ ecause of instinct but ­because they ­were profitable for the governing class and ­because the “national security man­ag­ers” ­were taught to absolve themselves of personal responsibility for “bureaucratic hom­i­ cide.” But even Barnet was not immune to the aggressionists’ charms or above using Lorenz’s arguments for his own purposes. On Aggression could be, and certainly was, read “to mean that man was a hopeless predator who cannot help fighting wars against his fellow man”—­the view 159

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that offered comfort to the war hawks. This, however, was actually a mis­ reading, Barnet maintained: in fact Lorenz’s book r­ eally supported “the proposition that social organ­ization is at least as impor­tant as instinct in driving men, unlike other animals, to fight in groups against their own kind for abstract princi­ples.”76 Thus the Lorenzians’ message could be, and was, taken both to justify vio­lence and to avoid it, both to sanction aggression and to seek alternatives to it, both to group ­humans with and to separate them from other animals. Readers, including policymakers, projected their own meanings onto Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s books, read selectively, and saw in them what they wanted to see. Part of the reason for the aggressionists’ popu­lar appeal must surely rest in the flexibility of their arguments. Far from being oversimplified popularizations, the books themselves ­were complex enough to support diverse interpretations.

Lorenz Recruits Philip Wylie to the Cause Lorenz was exquisitely sensitive to Montagu’s frontal assault in Man and Aggression and responded in kind. In 1970–1971, a two-­volume set of the ethologist’s collected papers appeared in both the original German and in En­glish translation.77 In his introductions to t­ hese volumes, rather than simply casting a retrospective glance over his work, Lorenz used the opportunity to depict in vivid terms and to shape the landscape of the aggression debate. He located himself at “the storm centre of an anthropological controversy . . . ​triggered off” by On Aggression that, in his view, pitted biology-­denying social scientists against the loyal followers of Darwin. “Some anthropologists who had not hitherto grasped all the inferences of Charles Darwin’s discoveries have at last realized that their own theories are being jeopardized.” He classified his opponents as ­either “idealistic and vitalistic phi­los­op ­ hers,” who believed in the uniqueness of man and the inexplicability of his be­hav­ior, or “behaviorists,” who held that man is “devoid of instincts” and all be­hav­ior is learned. “Ashley Montagu has formulated that dogma with all desirable clarity.” ­These categories did not accurately fit his critics in Man and Aggression, but that did not seem to ­matter. Lorenz’s point was to portray his critics as extremists, in contrast to whom the ethologist himself threaded “the narrow but golden mean of plain commonsense.” That instinct largely determined ­human be­hav­ior as well as that of animals should come as “no surprise” to any “biological thinking scientist,” Lorenz asserted, but “by emphasizing it and drawing the social and po­liti­cal inferences I seem to have 160

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incurred the fanatical hostility of all t­ hose doctrinaires whose ideology has tabooed recognition of this fact.”78 And ­here Lorenz recruited a new ally to the cause. Philip Wylie, Lorenz noted, thought that the hostility of his critics was actually “instinctual.” The ethologist peppered his introduction to volume 1 with supportive quotes from Wylie. “Wylie is pessimistic about ever ‘conquering the behavioristic doctrine,’ ” Lorenz declared, even though “biology has proven that men are not equal, identical, similar, or anything of the sort. Common sense o ­ ught to have made that all clear to Java Man.” But “it ­didn’t and still ­doesn’t.”79 Philip Wylie was neither an ethologist nor even a scientist. But his was a name that American readers would have known. A best-­selling American author and high-­profile social commentator, Wylie had shot to fame on the basis of his 1942 book Generation of Vipers, a scorching critique of American mores.80 In quoting Wylie, Lorenz was employing a strategy that had worked well for him before: reaching outside his specialty, indeed outside of academia altogether, to find an articulate and like-­minded partisan. While scientists w ­ ere criticizing him, Lorenz was seeking out allies on a dif­fer­ent scale altogether. The two men helped each other fend off Lorenz’s enemies and broaden the appeal of Lorenz’s message even further. Wylie’s 1942 book became known for the nineteen pages that excoriated American motherhood, coining the term “Momism” to decry ­women who supposedly tyrannized over their sons and sapped their vitality and intellect. In 1947, he published another critical broadside, An Essay on Morals, subtitled (in part) A Popu­lar Explanation of the Jungian Theory of ­Human Instinct.81 Wylie presented himself as a devotee of Carl Jung, whom he had known personally. Exposure to analytical psy­chol­ogy had convinced Wylie that the ­human mind possessed unplumbed depths that exerted a power­ful influence still poorly understood. Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious explained why all ­people traced similar patterns in their be­hav­ior, dreams, myths, and legends. For Wylie, ­these “endlessly reiterated patterns” w ­ ere clues to the existence of h ­ uman instincts. Criticizing man’s dangerous ignorance of himself, Wylie offered the concept of instinct as the missing piece of the puzzle.82 Wylie was thus primed for the discovery of Lorenzian ethology, which gave renewed validity to the concept of instinct. By the time his Essay was published, Wylie had broken with Jung and was on the lookout for a new intellectual guide. He first encountered Lorenz when he saw 161

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the ethologist imprint ducklings on a New York lecture tour in the 1950s. By the mid-1960s, Wylie was explic­itly incorporating ethology into his work. In his 1968 book The Magic Animal, a condemnation of humanity’s—­ particularly Americans’—­attitudes ­toward nature, Wylie used “nature” to refer both to external nature and to internal ­human nature. Calling man the “magic animal” was not a compliment: the author asserted that man has used “magic” of all kinds (his imagination, his religion, his rationalizations) to place himself above nature, as its overlord and master, exceptional, and infinitely superior to animals. This attitude resulted, most immediately, in ruination of the environment and pollution of air and ­water.83 But even worse, the “magic” attitude led man to deny the nature within himself: his own instincts. Uppermost among ­these was the territorial imperative, to which Wylie devoted a chapter. Robert Ardrey had proven the importance of territorial aggression in driving nationalism and in establishing pecking ­orders within society; Lorenz had plumbed the mysteries of ritualization in turning aggression aside (a power that ­humans seemed to have lost). To ­these formulations Wylie contributed an emphasis on territorial animals’ need for “certain, sufficient room,” which was frustrated in increasingly overcrowded cities. Territorial creatures, including h ­ umans, Wylie professed, have a “built-in morality” and its suppression could bring only destruction.84 Like Ardrey, Wylie used an ethological lens to explain the summertime rioting of “Negroes” (to whom Wylie was sympathetic) in American cities. Neither poverty nor lack of good schools drove this unrest, according to Wylie, but rather the need for territory. “What ­these luckless and maltreated folks need is room, primarily.”85 Just as man must recognize the futility of trying to control external nature, so he must acknowledge and obey his own inner law. For helping to perpetrate “the colossal fraud, the idea [that man] is other than the rest of living t­ hings on this planet,” Wylie indicted that “crackpot crusade” and “fifty year folly”: behaviorism.86 The Magic Animal thus became another outpost of pop ethology on the American scene. In his book Wylie appropriated Lorenzian ideas of instinct and territory, of domestication and civilization as degeneration. By placing them in the context of a screed against American consumerism, he repackaged them in a po­liti­cally progressive wrapping. Cleansing the ideas of any right-­wing or Nazi taint, Wylie connected them to nature conservation and to antiracism, and in so ­doing made “­human nature” available in 162

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new form for Lorenz to reuse. Wylie also reiterated and reinforced the Lorenzian opposition to behaviorism, on which he trained his sights as public ­enemy number one and chief target of his invective. “Liberals and intellectuals” flocked to behaviorism’s claim for the supposed essential equivalence of all ­people—­all can be molded by environment, in the same ways and to the same extent. But in Wylie’s po­liti­cal repackaging—in the way it exempted man from nature—no doctrine could be more illiberal. Once his book was out, Wylie struck up a warm correspondence with Lorenz.87 They held each other in high esteem and shared acute distaste for the “instinct deniers,” whom Wylie dubbed the “Liberal Intellectual Establishment” (“one can hardly resist shortening that to L.I.E.”). Presenting himself in long, rambling missives as Lorenz’s devoted and ­humble acolyte, Wylie credited the ethologist’s support with a transformative impact on him: “So, thank you, sir. It was not my day or my year that your recent letter ‘made.’ In a very real way, it made my life.”88 Wylie was a perfect exemplar of Lorenz’s truth-­perceiving amateur, the layman unencumbered by fancy degrees or theoretical knowledge, who could see more clearly than the professionals and academics. Wylie’s and Lorenz’s letters reveal something of the tenor of the aggression debate. This was no polite disagreement over disembodied ideas, or even over evidence or facts, but an acrimonious and ad hominem clash of incompatible positions and personalities, basically unresolvable ­because it was founded in deep personal dislike and disrespect. “Thanks for noting a c­ ouple of my anti-­saints,” Wylie remarked to Lorenz. “Ashley Montague [sic], I’ve met. A rather charming exponent of non-­think,” whom Wylie nicknamed “the g­ reat Dr. Ashpit Multifool.”89 Lorenz reassured his friend that the opposition was not invincible: “Have you read Ashley Montagu’s collection ‘Man and Aggression’? It contains the silliest asses which I know and their joint forces, in spite of their mutual contradictions somehow makes me hope that they feel cornered. . . . ​They are so obviously frothing at the mouth.” Thanking Wylie for the term “anti-­ saints,” Lorenz continued, “In any case it is good fun fighting them and it gives you a sound raison d’etre. I had much rather have you as a friend than as an antagonist, and I’d much rather have any of our anti-­saints for an antagonist than for a friend.”90 Wylie agreed with Lorenz that their opponents ­were “on the run”: he reported having heard some “top biological research scientists” defend Lorenz, and this convinced him that “the regressive minority of pavlovian salivators must be in some sort of bizarre retreat.”91 163

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Their private friendship mirrored a public alliance. Wylie discussed Lorenz and his work in The Magic Animal. Lorenz, in turn, wrote a preface to the German edition of that work. In his introduction to the 1970 volume of his collected papers, Lorenz quoted Wylie’s book and used the ideas that had emerged in their correspondence, drawing on Wylie’s notion of belief-­as-­territory to describe the “fanatical hostility” of his enemies. Openly and proudly proclaiming Wylie as an ally, Lorenz deployed Wylie’s words to depict his opponents as behaviorists with a po­liti­cal ax to grind. The ethologist wrote to his friend, “The Magic Animal is with me constantly and you w ­ ill be surprised how often you find yourself quoted in the ­things I am writing at pre­sent. I am certainly making use of your generous permission to employ your writing. I most sincerely admire (and enjoy) your power of formulation.”92 In Wylie, Lorenz found a confederate who saw the debate in the same terms as he did, and who helped him frame it as a ­battle against the forces of unreason.93

Daniel Lehrman Steps into the Ring Lorenz’s depiction of the polarized landscape of the aggression debate did not go unchallenged. In 1970, Daniel Lehrman, the American comparative psychologist who had been one of Lorenz’s earliest and sternest critics, strenuously objected to Lorenz’s characterization of his opponents as “behaviorists.” The caricature rankled. “The term ‘behaviorist’ is an affront to the memory of T.  C. Schneirla”—­Lehrman’s late teacher—­ “whose lifelong work was a thoughtful, penetrating and broadly based analy­sis” of a range of ­factors, physiological, ecological, and social, in the development of ant be­hav­ior. “His work was not remotely related to the tradition of American ‘rat psy­chol­ogy’ to which Lorenz refers by the term ‘behaviorism.’ As for me,” Lehrman continued, “the reason I chose to study with Schneirla was the same as the reason I chose to become a student of animal be­hav­ior: I was interested in understanding the be­hav­ior of birds as I had observed it in my youth”—­a motivation not so very dif­ fer­ent from Lorenz’s own. “If Lorenz intended to be tactful by pointing out that Schneirla and I should not be regarded as biologists, then the intention failed. I would much rather be called stupid!”94 Rehearsing the criticisms of Lorenz he had first made in 1953, Lehrman emphasized that Lorenz’s rigid separation of be­hav­ior into “innate” and “learned” ignored the pro­cess of development, which involved continuous interactions between a behaving organism and all the vari­ous 164

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levels of its environment, not a clean unfolding of a predetermined pattern. Denying that a be­hav­ior pattern was “innate” did not mean that it was therefore entirely “learned”: Lehrman objected to the very dichotomy itself as untrue to nature and unproductive. Reducing the complex category of “experience” simply to “learning” ignored the many dif­fer­ent ways that organisms interacted with their environments. Lehrman conceded that he had been a bit nasty in 1953, but he stood by his critique, concluding that he and Lorenz ­were interested in dif­fer­ent sorts of prob­lems. The ethologist focused on already full-­blown be­hav­ior patterns and their adaptive significance, assuming that “the innate is what is t­ here before the learning begins.” For himself and Schneirla, by contrast, the prob­lem was to analyze how be­hav­ior develops over the lifetime of an organism.95 Lorenz never acknowledged Lehrman’s critique of the innate / learned dichotomy. His portrayal of his opponents remained unchanged from where it stood in 1965. In his introduction to the second volume of his collected papers in En­glish translation, published in 1971, Lorenz criticized “behaviorists” both for ignoring the physiological ­causes and evolution of be­hav­ior and for being on the wrong side of a Cold War strug­gle. Stressing the po­liti­cal stakes of the debate, Lorenz explained that behaviorism meant social conditioning, the desire to manipulate masses of ­people. “The belief that a man is exclusively the product of the conditioning which he received during his childhood and adolescence encourages the attempt at ‘social engineering’ which Lenin proposed.” As Wylie had before him, Lorenz linked behaviorism and communism and decried “the deleterious influence of an ideology which, even at pre­sent, has become a world religion.”96 Lorenz did, however, change his portrayal of Lehrman by enlisting his critic as an ally in his fight against the behaviorists. Lehrman’s critique of behaviorism now appeared in the ser­vice and support of Lorenz’s own: “As D.L. [sic] Lehrman has recently pointed out, ‘It is not only the subject which is denatured by behaviourist psy­chol­ogy; the experimenter himself is not permitted to be entirely ­human.’ ” Lorenz cemented the link between politics and science: “Behaviouristic philosophy, by gaining po­ liti­cal ascendancy, constitutes a real threat to the very essence of ­human freedom.”97 In one deft maneuver, Lorenz managed—­while still failing to acknowledge Lehrman’s critique of his innate / learned dichotomy—to recruit Lehrman to his side against a much larger, common e­ nemy. The opponent was now not simply a rival school of animal be­hav­ior, but the threat that Wylie had ­imagined: a rival po­liti­cal system and its 165

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pseudoscientific supports. Behaviorism and environmentalism ­were chained to a system of oppressive manipulation and totalitarian authority, while ­human nature as a biological entity stood as the defense against totalitarianism. The effect of the aggression debate was to render ­these po­liti­cal associations seemingly immovable.

Male Bonding and Feminist Criticisms Although their purported focus was ­human nature, the pop ethologists never treated that nature as universally h ­ uman but always as differentiated according to gender. The anthropologists Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, cofound­ers of the Rutgers Department of Anthropology, revived and renewed ­after Montagu’s resignation, brought a “zoological” perspective to the social sciences, and both followed Lorenz and Ardrey in gendering aggression. In Men in Groups, Tiger spoke of male bonding—­the all-­male groups evident everywhere from hunting bands to sports teams, from fraternities to military battalions, from corporate boardrooms to the United States Congress—as the “spinal cord” that structured ­human society. Rooted in the ­human evolutionary past, such male bonds, Tiger argued, stimulated and promoted aggression, to which, like Ardrey, he gave a broad definition (encompassing every­thing from the killing of ­enemy troops to religious orthodoxy and advertising campaigns). “Males are prone to bond”; “male bonds are prone to aggress”—so Tiger’s syllogism went—­“therefore aggression is a predictable feature of h ­ uman groups of males.” Just as Ardrey used West Side Story as a source of evidence, Tiger spent pages analyzing William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies to support his contention that aggression was a male propensity.98 In The Imperial Animal, Tiger and Fox coined the term “biogram” to refer to the total repertoire of be­hav­iors of a species: the ways in which that species is “wired” to behave in response to certain stimuli. The ­human species, they theorized, was wired for hunting; this ele­ment of the behavioral biogram was as essential to ­humans as their tendency to have arms and legs. Differentiated by gender, the biogrammar dictated that men hunted and bonded with each other, while ­women gathered foodstuffs and cared for young. Every­thing ­else in ­human society—­including why men always dominated and always must dominate ­women in politics and business—­followed from this original, basic division of ­labor. Tiger and Fox took features of late twentieth-­century predatory capitalism and pronounced them biologically based consequences of the pri166

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mate “hunting economy.” “We must deal with the obvious not by wishing it away, but by dealing with it,” they concluded with a sigh. “It would indeed be better if it ­were not so, but it is so, and we must try to make it better.”99 The gender dimension of the claim for innate aggression became a prime target for feminist criticism. Elaine Morgan, a BBC screenwriter, disputed the aggressionists’ “Tarzanist” view of savannah hunting as the driver of ­human evolution. Exploding this “po­liti­cal myth” in The Descent of ­Woman, she proposed that all publications making such a claim should “attach an erratum sticker to the flyleaf” like “the health ­hazard warning on cigarette packs.”100 Instead of centering the ­human evolutionary story on Ardrey’s killer proto-­man, Morgan focused on the role of ­woman the gatherer. Much as the pop ethologists did, Morgan also used putative features of ­human ancestry to explain present-­day circumstances and arrangements. She argued controversially that the evolution of humanity had been driven by the fact that ­human ancestors had spent several million years in a semiaquatic existence—­a fact she deployed to explain all the curious physical and behavioral quirks of the “naked ape,” beginning with her nakedness.101 If Morgan offered an alternative to the masculinist evolutionary myth, other feminists went even further in excoriating the sexist assumptions of the sciences of h ­ uman nature. In “Psy­chol­ogy Constructs the Female,” a paper she first presented in 1968, the psychologist Naomi Weisstein took aim at psychological and psychoanalytic theorists (Freud, Bettelheim, Erikson) who presented ­women as infantile, dependent, and defined solely by their ability to attract and keep a man.102 Such theories, she argued, ­were male fantasies suffering from a total lack of evidence: their proponents simply failed to consider any evidence that conflicted with their preconceived notions. She also pointed out that t­ hese theories neglected any role for social context and overemphasized supposedly innate ­factors, even though studies had shown that context had an indelible shaping impact in be­hav­ior. Biological theories of be­hav­ior ­were, in Weisstein’s view, just as problematic. Theories based on primate studies carefully chose to discuss only ­those species that displayed “exactly the kind of be­hav­ior that the proponents of the biological basis of ­human female be­hav­ior wish ­were true for ­humans.” Lionel Tiger provided “an extreme example of this maiming and selective truncation of the evidence.” On the basis of studies of only two primate species, Tiger’s Men in Groups had maintained that 167

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“male bonding” was universal and instinctual, that females ­were incapable of bonding, and that, as a result, females would never play any role in public life. “The ‘male bond,’ ” Weisstein scoffed, “is hardly a serious contribution to scholarship.” Her paper ended on an overtly feminist note: the question of what differences, if any, existed between male and female be­hav­ior could be addressed only once “social expectations” for men and ­women ­were equal and commanded equal re­spect. ­Until then, any answers “­will simply reflect our prejudices.”103 In Weisstein’s view, it was not their sexism alone that made t­ hese theories wrong. They represented bad science—­shot through with preconceptions, ignoring evidence—­and Weisstein implied that if their scientific practices improved, a truer and more equitable theory would result. Science, if done properly, could not fail to be liberating. The blatant sexism of pop ethology helped to galvanize other second wave feminists as well. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics amplified Weisstein’s critique of Tiger. Tiger’s claim for a male bonding instinct misrepresented the work of the ethologists, Millett argued, and since Tiger drew his evidence for male dominance from patriarchal history itself, “his pretensions to physical evidence are both specious and circular.”104 Tiger, clearly stung by the critique, mounted a defense in the New York Times Magazine: “Male Dominance? Yes, Alas. A Sexist Plot? No.”105 Lila Leibowitz, an anthropologist, similarly combined feminist and scientific criticism of Desmond Morris. The Naked Ape claimed that men’s sexual preferences (for “breasts, buttocks, and body hair”) s­ haped the female body over the course of evolution. Such a theory, Leibowitz observed, “reek[ed] of male supremacy,” but this was not the only ­thing wrong with it. She bolstered her “emotional reactions” with a review of the theory’s main scientific flaw.106 T ­ here could be other reasons for the evolution of breasts besides their attractiveness to men, Leibowitz reasoned; their fatty tissue provided insulation that helped keep milk warm, a vital benefit to ­mother and offspring. In looking for explanations, why not consider survival value first? Like Weisstein, Leibowitz took Morris to task for violating Occam’s razor, a key criterion of good science. The feminist and Communist writer Evelyn Reed put more faith in socialist revolution than in science, criticizing the pop ethologists in even stronger and more openly po­liti­cal terms.107 Ardrey, Lorenz, and Morris posited an aggression instinct in animals and man in order to deny the real cause of war: the capitalistic ruling class and its imperialistic aims. In fact, war had nothing to do with instinct. “Animal fights, personal 168

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squabbles, and imperialist wars are all dumped into the same sack to substantiate the falsification that h ­ umans are nothing but animals and never passed beyond that stage of development.” Citing Montagu and reiterating his arguments, Reed asserted that the main motors of h ­ uman development w ­ ere cultural and social. She condemned the pop ethologists’ racism and sexism, ­going well beyond anything Montagu dared to put in print. Morris, Reed said, displayed a “profound animosity ­toward ­women” in emphasizing what ­women must do to render themselves attractive to men, and “pumped sex into his sexist book” by including titillating descriptions. Ardrey, whose male supremacy was matched only by his white supremacy, was “an out­spoken jingo” who “loved white South Africa,” in spite of its “teensy racial prob­lems.”108 The feminists mounted effective attacks on the manifold weaknesses of pop ethology, not only its sexism, but also its racism and its poorly justified scientific arguments. Montagu, however, was never able to bring any of the feminists into his co­ali­tion of critics, even though the feminists ­were formulating their criticisms at the very same time that he was mustering an opposition to the killer instinct. It is unlikely that, voracious reader that he was, he was unaware of them. Rather, he did not include them b ­ ecause he could not come to terms with their brand of feminism, which was so entirely dif­f er­ent from his own essentialist brand. ­Women’s nature, grounded in biology, centered on childbearing and on nurture, was ultimately the one ­thing on which Montagu and his opponents, the believers in innate aggression, could agree. It was the one remaining plank of their common platform of assumptions that did not get disrupted by the aggression debate. ­Because of its persistence—­because Montagu could not give up on the essentialist view of ­women’s nature that he had held since the 1950s—he could not make an alliance with the feminist critics of pop ethology. They remained outside his conception of what “the debate” was, and outside his anti-­aggressionist alliance.

The Aggression Debate, Round Two, 1973 By the early 1970s, Montagu felt the need for another coordinated attack on the killer instinct, in the form of a second edition of Man and Aggres­ sion.109 His target had broadened: the four key “aggressionists” ­were now Lorenz, Ardrey, Morris, and Storr, with Tiger and Fox as auxiliaries (figure 5.1). More critiques of their views w ­ ere available than in 1968, and Montagu used his new volume to take advantage of them. The second 169

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5.1  Ardrey, Lorenz, and Morris, each with characteristic attributes, depicted

as apes perched on the branches of the tree of social Darwinism. Illustration by Sharleen Pederson.

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e­ dition contained eight new essays and reprinted twelve essays from the ­earlier edition, along with Montagu’s original introduction. If the first edition had revealed some cracks in Montagu’s consensus, by the second edition t­ hese had widened into glaring inconsistencies. The new essays hardly lined up ­behind Montagu in a uniform way. Some of the new contributions endorsed Montagu’s emphasis on learning, experience, and culture in shaping be­hav­ior. But o ­ thers, reviewing the 1968 volume critically, reproduced an impression of the aggression debate as an opposition between polarized positions—an opposition, they argued, that would have to be transcended if the truth w ­ ere to be found. Rather than portraying Montagu’s position as the only reasonable one—as Montagu himself did in his contributions—­these authors depicted Montagu as driven into a corner, forced to maintain an allegiance to an ultimately untenable blank-­slate view. A few of the articles, in seeking a “reasonable” ­middle ground, actually supported Lorenzian claims. Of the new contributors, the paleoanthropologist David Pilbeam and anthropologist Hermann Helmuth stood closest to Montagu. Pilbeam examined primatological evidence, arguing that dominance hierarchies ­will “come and go” with certain environmental pressures and ­were “largely artifacts of abnormal environments.” Like Montagu, Pilbeam underscored the general prob­lem of “extrapolation from monkey to man.” Terms like “status” implied value, pointing to be­hav­iors that ­were “cultural, ­human, and practically unique.”110 Such terms could have no relevance to animals. Similarly, Helmuth noted that primatologists had concluded that “an aggressive drive seems to play a rather insignificant role” among monkeys and apes, nor did such a drive exist in all ­human cultural groups. “­Human nature as a basis for be­hav­ior,” according to Helmuth, echoing Montagu, “is formed, permeated, and directed by the form of culture.”111 But other contributors abandoned this culturalist stance. The psychologist Leonard Berkowitz criticized Montagu’s statement that ­human be­hav­ior was learned, using it to exemplify what he called an extreme “experience-­is-­all imperialism.” For Berkowitz t­ here had to be “other alternatives” to the polarized positions of the debate, alternatives that acknowledged the possibility that some ­human aggressiveness could indeed “derive from man’s biological properties”—­though not necessarily in the way that Lorenz believed.112 Berkowitz himself argued that although a tendency for aggression existed in ­humans, ­actual violent be­hav­ior had to be triggered by a cue—­the sight of a gun, for example, or a film depiction 171

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of vio­lence.113 The science writer Morton Hunt, in an article that had appeared in Playboy, went even further than Berkowitz. Hunt analyzed the debate itself, including the 1968 volume, representing it as an opposition between extremes—­nature versus nurture, pessimists versus optimists—­and declared that the truth must lie somewhere in between. On the optimists’ side, Montagu stood at the furthest pole, Hunt claimed, critically quoting Montagu’s mantra that “man is man ­because he has no instincts.” Most students of animal be­hav­ior took positions “somewhere between t­ hese two poles of thought” and rejected “nature-­nurture” as an outmoded and meaningless dilemma. Hunt concluded that man did possess instincts, though t­ hese did not produce specific, predictable, ste­reo­ typed be­hav­ior patterns. The word “instinct” was the prob­lem, not the concept itself. “One wishes,” Hunt mused, “that t­ here w ­ ere another word 114 for it when referring to man.” If Hunt and Berkowitz portrayed Montagu as occupying one pole of a debate between extremists—­exactly the way the aggressionists portrayed him—­other contributors outright endorsed positions that Montagu explic­itly rejected. The ethologist Peter Klopfer, while criticizing the pitfalls of analogical reasoning and Ardrey’s analogies in par­tic­ul­ar, nonetheless asserted that “none of this should be taken to imply that ­human be­hav­ior cannot be understood by reference to animal studies” (which was of course exactly what Montagu and his closest allies had maintained).115 The biochemist René Dubos strayed even further from Montagu’s stronghold and rehearsed well-­worn Lorenzian tropes. H ­ uman instincts have become warped u ­ nder conditions of civilization, Dubos claimed, and what­ ever capacity to control aggression h ­ umans once possessed has lost its potency in modern society. Social restraint has thus far not substituted adequately for the “biological wisdom” that could no longer keep pace with the pressures and temptations of modern life. Borrowing a page from Lorenz and Storr, Dubos declared, “To minimize the destructive effects of vio­lence, we might find it profitable to take a lesson from the animal world and try systematically to ritualize our conflicts. . . . ​If modern socie­ ties could develop effective techniques for the ritualization of ­conflicts— by global Olympic games, for example, or by space exploration—­they might achieve something like what William James called the moral equivalent of war.” In a move that Montagu would have deplored, Dubos argued for bringing ­human society into closer alignment with “our unchangeable animal nature.”116

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In his contribution, the psychiatrist Leon Eisenberg trained a spotlight on the politics of the aggressionists. In the 1968 volume, Montagu and the other contributors had criticized both Lorenzian ethology and the repugnant policy implications that they thought it conveyed. The critics recognized that the theory of innate aggression, even apart from its scientific weaknesses, was po­liti­cally dangerous ­because it seemed to sanction vio­lence. As Montagu had, Eisenberg elevated the normative as a criterion of theory choice. Ethology’s conceptual and evidentiary failings, however g­ reat, paled beside the normative criterion, and the po­liti­cal and moral repercussions of the science became paramount. Ethology had to be judged, Eisenberg argued, on the kind of social world it would produce: “The study of man takes its meaning from involvement in the strug­gle for ­human betterment.”117 Eisenberg also reiterated Montagu’s point that theories of ­human nature acted as self-­fulfilling prophecies: what we chose to believe about ourselves directed and l­imited what we could become. Much was therefore at stake in the aggression debate; for Eisenberg as for Montagu “this was no mere academic exercise,” and ­there could be no neutrality.118 But Eisenberg’s po­liti­cal focus departed from Montagu’s in an impor­tant way. Montagu had refrained from impugning the reputations of Lorenz and Ardrey themselves, concurring with Samuel Barnett and T. C. Schneirla that the ad hominem attack was taboo. Now, however, in the 1973 volume, Eisenberg shattered the e­ arlier decorous consensus by making Lorenz’s Nazi past directly relevant to the debate. Unearthing a long passage from Lorenz’s 1940 “Durch Domestikation” paper, Eisenberg wrote, “Lorenz’s ‘scientific’ logic justified Nazi l­egal restrictions against intermarriage with non-­Aryans. The wild extrapolations from domestication to civilization, from ritualized animal courtship patterns to h ­ uman be­hav­ior, from species to races, are so gross and unscientific, the conclusions so redolent of concentration camps, that further commentary should be superfluous.” Aware that he was breaking the conventions of a scientific debate, Eisenberg added, “Perhaps it is impolite to recall in 1972 what was written in 1940, but I, at least, find 1940 difficult to forget.”119 The danger was now not simply that ethology might lead to a new social Darwinism, that it could appear to carry racist and retrograde po­ liti­cal connotations. Rather, Eisenberg’s accusation was direct and personal: at a certain point in the past Lorenz himself through his scientific writings had actually supported the Nazi regime. Eisenberg broke open

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the story on Lorenz’s Nazi past. He took the social Darwinist militaristic connotations of ethology—­based heretofore on analogy, prediction, and innuendo—­and gave them historical real­ity, rooting them in a specific moment in Lorenz’s c­ areer. Lorenz’s scientific work, including the views that he continued to uphold in On Aggression, was not simply reminiscent of eugenic reasoning: it was shown to have been part of the a­ ctual justification for the Final Solution. From this point forward, Lorenz’s Nazi ties became for his critics a central and vis­i­ble aspect of the debate, inseparable from the question of the validity of his theories. The 1973 edition of Man and Aggression, along with Lorenz’s writings from the early 1970s, reinforced the perception of the aggression ­debate as a confrontation between opposites. Nature was pitted against nurture, instinct against learning, “aggressionists” against “behaviorists,” pessimists against optimists. Po­liti­cally too the sides occupied opposite poles: fascists, racists, and Nazi sympathizers faced off against Marxists and Communists. The positions hardened; no compromise or common ground was pos­si­ble. While caricatures w ­ ere traded and vociferously disputed, nuances and subtleties of the ­actual positions got scrubbed out. The 1973 volume also demonstrated the difficulty of holding together an anti-­aggressionist co­ali­tion. Montagu and his allies could not agree on what ­angle of attack to take against their opponents. Too many options beckoned, some of which w ­ ere actually in conflict with each other. The resulting diversity, even cacophony, of views inevitably weakened the critique. Instead of presenting a unified front, Montagu’s army failed to rally ­behind its general and rode off wildly in all directions.

A Nobel Prize Winner Fends Off Nazi Accusations On October 12, 1973, a front-­page article in the New York Times announced that Konrad Lorenz had won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, along with Niko Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch, “three pioneers in the relatively new science of ethology.” The citation honored their work on insects, fish, and birds, which, it said, had “stimulated comprehensive research also on mammals, including man,” and noted their focus on both genet­ically programmed be­hav­ior and the stimuli during critical periods that called that be­hav­ior forth. The citation uncritically reproduced Lorenz’s own repre­sen­ta­tion of ethology as the golden, observation-­driven mean between ideological extremes, between the “vitalists” on the one hand and the “reflexologists and behaviorists” on the other. The same 174

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Times article carried biographical sketches, with portraits, of the three laureates. Lorenz’s sketch noted that he had spent “four years as a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union,” but omitted any mention of a Nazi past.120 But Lorenz’s history was not destined to remain long in the shadows. Shortly ­after the announcement of the prize, the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal asked Lorenz to decline ac­cep­tance as “a gesture of contrition.”121 Lorenz refused. A Los Angeles Times article reported that Lorenz did not deny his Nazi Party membership, but simply “asked understanding for that short time when he thought good might have come” from the regime.122 Lorenz dismissed his critics, claiming they misunderstood him: “Anyone accusing him of supporting the Nazi ideology should read his books, where his true views could be found,” the article reported him as saying. Lorenz’s Nobel ac­cep­tance speech made no mention of the growing controversy. Titled “Analogies as Sources of Knowledge,” its major claim, that “­there is no such ­thing as a false analogy,” seemed a direct rebuttal of the criticisms of Barnett and Montagu in Man and Aggression.123 In December 1973, set to coincide with Lorenz’s visit to Stockholm, The Sciences published “Winners and Sinners,” an article by Wallace Cloud that picked up the Nazi critique where Leon Eisenberg had left off. Eisenberg had maintained that Lorenz’s racialist and eugenic beliefs, expressed during his Nazi period, still underlay vast swaths of his science and ­were evident in On Aggression. Cloud quoted Fredric Wertham’s charge that “Lorenz’s theories are ‘distinctly Nazi theories,’ ” exhuming damning passages from Lorenz’s 1940 “Durch Domestikation” paper that the “ ‘symptoms of decay’ ” in h ­ uman species-­specific social conduct could “permeate the body of the p ­ eople like the cells of a cancer.” Reviewing Lorenz’s move from Vienna to a full professorship at the University of Königsberg in 1940, Cloud determined that the ethologist had been “a man of influence in Nazi Germany” and had been rewarded for his views.124 Cloud cited Margaret Mead in Lorenz’s defense. The anthropologist declared herself “shocked to learn,” according to Cloud’s article, “that questions of Nazism w ­ ere being raised. ‘Lorenz is an Austrian and he was in the Austrian army,’ ” Mead was quoted as saying. “He was a prisoner in Rus­sia all through World War II and he’s been systematically persecuted ever since.” Mead called the Nobel Prize “a very impor­tant breakthrough” and “a recognition of the importance of the study of be­hav­ior,” with which all behavioral scientists would be “delighted.”125 Had Lorenz been a “toady” for the Nazi party? Or had he been trying to be a “positive force” without getting in trou­ble himself? Cloud 175

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c­ onceded that t­ hese questions remained unanswered; “very few p ­ eople” had read Lorenz’s Nazi-­era papers in the original German, and “nobody” had talked with him about his activities in East Prus­sia, his Rus­sian incarceration, and “the profound psychological depression” that followed. Yet criticism outweighed defense. Cloud concluded his article by quoting Ashley Montagu: “So what? So he was a Nazi.” Neatly pivoting from his ­earlier stance that Lorenz’s personal po­liti­cal beliefs should be irrelevant in scientific debate, Montagu continued, “Of course, I would strongly maintain that a man’s scientific ideas are not unrelated to his po­liti­cal affiliations and to his past history.” Throwing Lorenz’s charge of “behaviorism” back at him, Montagu characterized Lorenz’s views as leading to “a sort of insectification of humanity, a sort of B. F. Skinnerian view of man as an automaton for whom freedom and dignity are just beyond his capacity.” Cloud let Montagu have the last word on Lorenz’s Nobel: “As many ­horses’ necks as ­horses’ asses receive prizes, and when you put the two together, you have a complete donkey.”126 Although it did not reach any definitive conclusions, Cloud’s article made one t­ hing very clear: the issue of Lorenz’s Nazi ties was not g­ oing to go away any time soon. The article opened a floodgate, sweeping away Montagu’s e­ arlier scruples and rolling the fascist associations of ethology to the center of the aggression debate. Media coverage of Lorenz thereafter confronted the issue head on. In ­these forums, unable any longer to dismiss his past, Lorenz was fi­nally forced to engage it.

Lorenz Preaches on the Deadly Sins In the midst of this torrent, Lorenz produced another popu­lar book. In Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins, the ethologist a­ dopted an accustomed stance—­that of a “prophet crying in the wilderness” delivering a “sermon” aimed at familiar targets: domestication and its deleterious effects, behaviorism, and loss of traditional values.127 But he also presented himself in a new way: as a steward of the natu­ral world as well as of the instinctual repertoire of animals and h ­ umans. Taking his cue from Philip Wylie, Lorenz explic­itly equated nature and h ­ uman nature, ideals he celebrated for their purity and authenticity. The threats to both ideals, according to Lorenz, stemmed from a single root prob­lem: overpopulation.128 This was the first and most basic “deadly sin,” and it underlay all the ­others. It led directly to “devastation of the environment,” the second sin, but also, just as directly, to the de176

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struction of h ­ uman nature. Crowded cities, Lorenz averred, dulled ­human emotion and normal ­human response and heightened the tendency for aggression. Our neighbor was no longer someone to re­spect and love, but someone against whom to compete, in a “blood-­pressure raising, nerve-­ wracking race” for commercial gain, Lorenz’s sin number three. The mad rush, the unremitting competition, the fixation on material goods—­the hallmarks, according to Lorenz, of modern civilization—­contributed to “entropy of feeling” (sin number four).129 Since for Lorenz emotion was the outward sign of instinct, any denaturing of emotional response indicated a breakdown of innate behavioral norms: an instance of what he called “ge­ne­tic decay” (sin number five). H ­ uman value judgments and standards of right be­hav­ior rested on a “phyloge­ne­tically programmed apparatus,” the h ­ uman instincts. Instinctual breakdown allowed the growth of “social parasites,” which Lorenz compared to cancer cells. In a thinly veiled reformulation of the claims he had made de­cades e­ arlier, he argued that ­these infiltrating parasites ­were not alien races but youthful rebels and hippies, ­people without regard or re­spect for established social norms. In a dangerous “break with tradition” (sin number six), the younger generation tended to treat their elders as “an alien pseudospecies.”130 Taken together, ­these sins led up to the seventh and, in Lorenz’s view, the most horrifying: the increasing “indoctrinability” of h ­ uman beings. The breakdown of ­human nature, charted through all the previous sins, made pos­si­ble the molding of ­people to artificial standards, and such forceful reshaping led to further breakdown. The manipulability of mankind was enshrined in the doctrines of behaviorism and the conditioned reflex, which rested on the notion of h ­ uman nature as “a completely blank page.” From behaviorism Lorenz slid over easily into a critique of po­ liti­cal indoctrination, conditioning of ­people into “unresisting subjects,” ­whether by the “cap­i­tal­ist mass producer or the Soviet functionary.” At the climax of the chapter, Lorenz quoted Philip Wylie, who attributed the appeal of mass indoctrination to the goal of creating equality among ­people. But egalitarian promise conflated equal opportunity with equivalence. The ideal was not only pseudo-­democratic, it was literally “inhuman,” since it denied and suppressed the inborn features of ­human nature. “The fallacy of supposing that, given the proper conditioning, anything may be demanded of a person, anything made out of him, underlies many of the deadly sins committed by man against nature, including the nature of man, and against humanity.” In the face of such a dire threat, 177

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the eighth deadly sin, “the arming of mankind with nuclear weapons,” was tacked on almost as an afterthought, and indeed Lorenz claimed it was the easiest of the prob­lems to solve.131 Lorenz’s slim volume did not propose any specific antidotes to t­ hese sins, other than implying that ac­cep­tance of ­human instincts could address them. What the book did do, deftly, was create an equation between beliefs in ­human instinct and in the autonomy and sovereignty of the individual. As Ardrey had done in The Territorial Imperative, Lorenz set himself up as the advocate for the individual against The Machine: the science of instinct was on the side of the p ­ eople, the best defense of the ­little guy against overwhelming and oppressive po­liti­cal powers. Lorenz had found a way to tar his scientific enemies (behaviorists, learning theorists, cultural anthropologists) with a totalitarian and authoritarian brush. The book served to burnish its author’s liberal and humanistic credentials, cloaking claims about “ge­ne­tic decay”—­eugenic ideas he had held since the 1930s—in newly respectable guise.132 While he made no mention of the Nazi accusations that swirled around him, Lorenz neatly detached himself from racist implications by graphically reminding his readers of the time he had spent in a Rus­sian prisoner of war camp. He was the victim, not the perpetrator. This image-­making had an effect. The next time a discussion of Lorenz’s Nazi past appeared in the American popu­lar media, it was in a markedly less critical light than in Cloud’s article. In November 1974, Psy­ chol­ogy T ­ oday published Elizabeth Hall’s piece on “The Short Po­liti­cal Aberration of Konrad Lorenz.”133 The title summed up its conclusion: Lorenz’s deviation into the Nazi fold had been a youthful m ­ istake, not a lifelong obsession. Hall’s article allowed Lorenz to offer, in his own words, the most extensive public defense of his actions to date. “Of course I believed that some good might come of the Nazis. Much better, more intelligent men than I believed them, among them my f­ ather,” Lorenz explained. “That they meant murder when they said ‘se­lection’ was beyond the belief of anyone. I never believed the Nazi ideology, but like a fool I thought I could improve them, lead them to something better. It was a naive error.” According to Hall’s article, Lorenz had apologized in the Austrian press: “I deeply regret having employed the terminology of the time, which was subsequently used as a tool for the setting of horrible objectives.” Hall cited Tinbergen’s conclusion that Lorenz’s capitulation to “Hitler’s spell” was “very understandable” and that l­ ater he had “shrunk back in horror from it.”134 178

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While the picture of Lorenz the Nazi and the fascist associations of ethology became firmly lodged in his critics’ minds, Lorenz’s defenders explained away his past as a youthful “aberration” and spun a conception of him as a broad-­minded humanist. T ­ hese two images of Lorenz usually did not mix. But one place where they did appear side by side was in a 1975 article by the travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin.135 Chatwin visited Lorenz in Altenberg in an attempt to reconcile the “two Konrad Lorenzes,” the Nobel Prize winner and founder of ethology on the one hand, and the “blustering philosopher-­politician” on the other. The article began by securing the linkage between Lorenz and the Nazis: this was no youthful aberration, Chatwin maintained, but a lifelong obsession indeed. Dismissing the excuse of a “temporary lapse,” Chatwin connected the ideas expressed in Lorenz’s Nazi-­era writings with his arguments in On Aggression and Civ­ ilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins. “That the paper could be forgiven and buried ­every reasonable person would agree,” Chatwin noted, referring to Lorenz’s 1943 article “Innate Forms of Pos­si­ble Experience.” “But Lorenz himself has not chosen to do this. The same ideas, the same passages even, doctored for postwar sensibility, have resurfaced” in t­hese two ­later works. On Ag­ gression audaciously recycled “­whole chunks” of the 1943 paper, and Chatwin noted a striking resemblance between the ideas in Lorenz’s Eight Deadly Sins and Hitler’s in Mein Kampf.136 Yet ­toward the end of his article, Chatwin’s position took a surprising turn. He admitted that Lorenz’s warnings about the dangers of civilization, despite their murky past, had the ring of truth to them: “Like it or not,” Chatwin pointed out, “the German Social Darwinists ­were the first to express the fear that modern industrial life would disrupt, fatally, the fragile balance of nature.” Their solutions w ­ ere cruel and crude, but this was not sufficient reason for dismissing their recognition of the prob­lem. Chatwin also accepted Lorenz’s assessment of his critics: the cultural anthropologists and other “advocates of learning” had no way of explaining the universal and common aspects of h ­ uman be­hav­ior. Fi­nally, in a complete about-­face from his starting point, Chatwin de­cided that Lorenz’s own “complicated past” could be set aside in order to reveal ethology’s “one g­ reat advantage”—­the advantage that Wylie and Ardrey had also seen in it: “It revives absolute standards of good and bad. It offers a tenuous guarantee against arbitrary conditioning to the demands of the machine.” For Chatwin the biological bulwark provided by h ­ uman nature ensured the ­human ability to resist indoctrination, just as it had for Lorenz and his allies.137 179

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Unfolding concurrently with the aggression debate, the revelation of Lorenz’s Nazi past served to cement a public association between popu­lar ethology and right-­wing politics. Nevertheless, if Chatwin is any indication, this association did not spell instant doom for the Lorenzians’ ideas. ­Whether ­because Lorenz and his allies managed to repackage their claims in acceptable po­liti­cal wrapping, or b ­ ecause they so consistently branded their critics as “extremists,” popu­lar commentators and reviewers found redeeming value in their claim for h ­ uman instincts. Racism and Nazism could get explained away, leaving the killer instinct’s popularity untouched.

Montagu’s Last Salvo The year 1976 marked the publication of Montagu’s Nature of ­Human Aggression, the last salvo he aimed specifically against his aggressionist opponents. Even though the book appeared a de­cade ­after On Aggres­ sion and The Territorial Imperative, for Montagu l­ittle had changed. Their public was still “enormous.” Innate aggression was defended now not only by the ethologists and their scientific allies, but by a growing roster of artists and writers, many of whom took direct inspiration from Ardrey. The film director Stanley Kubrick had followed his Ardrey-­ inspired 2001 with A Clockwork Orange (1971), a film that critics said glorified vio­lence and depicted man as “ignoble savage.”138 Meanwhile Kubrick’s colleague Sam Peckinpah declared that the “ ‘myth of the noble savage is bull,’ as he handed out copies of Ardrey’s books.”139 The stakes for Montagu could not have been higher: the two sides of the debate represented not only two dif­fer­ent positions on h ­ uman nature, but two dif­fer­ent ways of being h ­ uman. How we or­ga­nized our society, how we behaved t­oward each other, individually and collectively—­nothing less than “the solutions to all our prob­lems”—­hinged on the image we held of “man.”140 The view of h ­ uman nature that Montagu presented in his book was, however, a complex one—­more complex than his opponents, then and since then, have given him credit for. With more space to expand his ideas than he had in his Man and Aggression essays, the nuances and subtleties of his position emerged from their eclipse. In the 1976 book he specifically refuted the notion of a tabula rasa, which he called “nonsensical.” Instead, he advocated an interactionist model in which biological potentialities come to full flower u ­ nder certain environmental conditions: “We 180

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can . . . ​accept the fact of the existence of biologically determined predispositions ­toward certain be­hav­ior patterns,” he wrote—­hardly the view of a blank slater—­“although I think ‘influenced’ would prob­ably be nearer the mark and safer than ‘determined.’ ” Nature versus nurture, innate versus learned—­the terms in which the aggression debate was habitually pursued—­represented a false dichotomy. Emphasizing Schneirla’s and Lehrman’s concepts of maturation and experience, Montagu argued that interaction was two-­way and continuous: genes influenced the expression of traits, while genes themselves w ­ ere influenced by the environments in which they functioned. Emphasizing that genes could not be envisioned as providing “blueprints” or “wiring” for be­hav­ior, Montagu contrasted the overly simplistic concept of instinct with what he felt was his own more sophisticated view.141 Montagu objected to the inevitability and automaticity implicit in the idea of instinct and specifically to the claims for an aggression instinct. In its place he argued not for a blank slate but for an inherent tendency t­oward cooperation in ­humans and their nearest primate relatives. He did not put this claim in the strong terms he had used in the 1950s, that love and co­operation w ­ ere “biologically determined” needs. But he did say that co­operation and mutual aid formed “a single thread” throughout ­human evolution, without which our species would never have achieved its humanity. He claimed that nonhuman primates had a “natu­ral tendency” to be cooperative and sociable, and that this meant that early h ­ umans ­adopted ways of living that also “promoted cooperation.” He drew evidence from hunter-­gatherer socie­ties to argue that “the highest premium was placed by natu­ral se­lection on cooperative be­hav­ior” in the course of ­human evolution. The cooperative drives “have played a vastly more impor­tant role” in evolution than have the h ­ uman “potentialities” for vio­lence. And a drive, he averred, is “a very dif­fer­ent t­ hing from an instinct.”142 Montagu’s endorsement of drives coexisted with his oft-­stated belief that “it is within the dimension of culture, the learned, the human-­ made part of the environment, that h ­ umans grow, develop, and function as behaving organisms.” Evidently the emphasis on the shaping power of culture did not mean that culture acted on a tabula rasa.143 In making such claims, Montagu was taking a step away from the strong environmentalist position he had ­adopted for polemical purposes in Man and Aggression, a position that his opponents consistently attributed to him. By 1976 he had reached a new point of synthesis in his theorizing on ­human nature. Without returning to the biological determinism he had advocated in the 181

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1950s, Montagu nonetheless managed to bring biology, and specifically the biology of cooperation, back into his picture of h ­ uman nature. Montagu took aim at a range of manifestations of innate aggression, but Lorenz and Ardrey w ­ ere his consistent targets. Lorenz was “­really a moralist concerned with the prob­lem of evil,” a “magician,” using “prestidigitation” to pull off “anthropomorphic tricks.” The ethologist’s claim that war served as an outlet for personal aggression was completely wrong: “If wars w ­ ere due to the arousal of instinctive drives,” Montagu countered, “nations would not have to resort to conscription and the draft in order to raise armies.” He reserved special ire for Ardrey who had, in the Lorenzians’ accustomed mode, characterized the anthropologist’s beliefs as “reminiscent of John Broadus Watson’s behavioristic psy­chol­ogy”—­a theory Montagu called “discredited” and “absurd.” He laced into Ardrey’s anthropomorphic depictions of the g­ reat apes as territorial and aggressive. “ ‘Gangs?’ ‘Thugs?’ ” Montagu jeered. “Does Mr. Ardrey r­ eally believe that ­these are the proper terms which appropriately describe the dominant animals of the baboon group?” Such “prejudicial language distorts the facts.” Returning to the extended religious meta­phor he had used in Man and Aggression, Montagu sarcastically described Ardrey’s relationship to Dart: Johannesburg was Ardrey’s “Road to Damascus,” and, tutored by Dart, “Ardrey underwent that conversion which has made him the most widely read apostle of the new litany of original sin. His own writings constitute an exegesis on the gospel according to Dart.” T ­ here was apparently no greater insult than to call someone’s science a religion, and Montagu, accused of hewing to social scientific “orthodoxy,” h ­ ere showed that 144 he could give as good as he got. However flawed the aggressionists’ theories, it was the po­liti­cal overtones of their arguments to which Montagu objected most strenuously. He attributed to Ardrey the suggestion that “it would be a biologically quite natu­ral event ­were territorially defended racial enclaves to be established in the United States and elsewhere.” Still, Montagu admitted that his opponents did not always make their politics as “explicit” as one might expect. Rather, the danger lay in the ways that they w ­ ere, or could be, read and used, especially by nonscientists. Citing a management con­ sul­tant’s use of The Territorial Imperative to justify rapacious business practices, Montagu claimed that the book was used to sanction “racism, prejudice, and the takeover of the planet by cartels,” just like a “new Social Darwinism.” Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s views “could quite easily be exploited by a nationalist racist ideology such as the inhuman apartheid doctrine in 182

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practice in South Africa . . . ​as well as enlisted to serve and reinforce the endemic racism of the United States.”145 Montagu ­stopped short of accusing Lorenz and Ardrey of personally harboring racist views and left untouched the ­matter of Lorenz’s Nazi past: the personal predilections of his opponents seemed somehow to ­matter less to him. But once their ideas fell into the hands of unsophisticated nonscientists, danger loomed. Oblivious to the deep flaws of “innate aggression,” politicians and educators could operationalize this theory and truly fulfill Montagu’s prediction about its becoming “a way of being ­human.” T ­ here could be l­ ittle doubt, he warned darkly, that “the writings of the innate aggressionists have not gone unnoticed [in Washington, DC], for they provide a more than acceptable rationalization for the policies of the Pentagon.”146 It was just such a rationalization, a distraction from what Montagu believed w ­ ere the real c­ auses of vio­lence—­poverty, injustice, and especially the frustration of needs for love and acceptance—­that his 1976 volume was designed to combat. The last section of the book was titled simply “Love.”

The Legacy of the Aggression Debate The aggression debate never reached resolution. Ten years ­after it had begun, the sides remained just as locked in disagreement as they had ever been, their conflict just as unrelenting and as personal. The question that divided them—­what was h ­ uman nature?—­remained unanswered, though the debate reformulated it even more fundamentally as w ­ hether t­ here was actually such a ­thing as “­human nature.” But even if no closure occurred, by 1976 the principals in the debate had moved on, and so that year marks a con­ve­nient endpoint to their story. Even while he was writing The Na­ ture of ­Human Aggression, Montagu, true to his persona as spokesman for a liberal scientific worldview, kept his eye on the other ­causes that mattered to him. He confronted another Nobel Prize winner notorious for his racism, William Shockley—­the physicist who insisted that Black p ­ eople ­were innately inferior in intelligence to whites—­and edited a volume of essays criticizing claims for a connection between race and IQ.147 Ardrey published his last book in 1976. The Hunting Hypothesis: A Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man was less widely reviewed than his ­earlier books.148 Dedicated to Raymond Dart, the man who had originally inspired him, the book recycled Ardrey’s ­earlier arguments for the importance to man’s evolutionary development 183

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of hunting and killing with weapons. War had pre-­dated the advent of agriculture in ­human prehistory, Ardrey claimed, presenting his views as vindicated by Sherwood Washburn, the Leakeys, and numerous primatologists. The “hunting hypothesis” Ardrey summed up in the book’s epigraph: “While we are members of the intelligent primate ­family, we are uniquely ­human even in the noblest sense, ­because for untold millions of years we alone killed for a living.” Once again vio­lence was located at the root of the ­human flowering. Ardrey placed par­tic­ul­ar emphasis on the gendered division of l­ abor among early ­human ancestors—­men hunted for meat, while ­women stayed home and protected the offspring—­a sexually segregated “bipolar society” that, he implied, present-­day ­humans have inherited. Ironically, given Montagu’s interests, Ardrey celebrated the “cooperation” among men in the hunting band.149 Lorenz marked the end of the aggression debate with the 1977 publication of the En­glish translation of his book ­Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natu­ral History of H ­ uman Knowledge.150 ­Here the ethologist appeared largely unchastened and unrepentant, as if the aggression debate had never occurred. In explaining the ­human mind, he emphasized the importance of instinct in ­human cultural be­hav­ior, the innate structures of thought and language, and the universal forms of emotional expression. He repeated well-­worn themes from his ­earlier work, criticizing “psychologists not well versed in biology” and inveighing against “nature / nurture” and the “tendency to think in opposites.”151 Of course the very division that Lorenz deplored was the ­thing that he had helped create. As the aggression debate drew to its ultimate stalemate, it left an indelible impression on midcentury scientific discourse about ­human nature, in the form of a polarized battlefield in which “extremists” confronted each other across a yawning and unbridgeable chasm. This ideological framing—­which was the result of the aggression debate, and not its cause— did a disser­vice to both sides, but particularly to Montagu’s, by failing to acknowledge or come to terms with the nuances and subtleties of his position. However unfair the caricature was, it served the aggressionists’ purposes. The very consistency with which the image of “extreme environmentalist” was drawn reinforced it and helped it to stick. The disarray among the aggressionists’ opponents also kept them on the defensive. T ­ here was no dearth of counterarguments against the Lorenzians, and ­those counterarguments w ­ ere power­ful. But the sheer diversity of options, and the disagreement about which approach was best, shadowed 184

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the critics’ work; even Montagu changed his own tack at certain points in the debate. The lack of consistency and unity among the critics—­well noted by the debate’s observers—­ended up weakening the opposition. Even as the antagonists had their last words on aggression, they pointed to the next step of the h ­ uman nature debate. By 1976, both Ardrey and Montagu seemed to realize that the controversy was shifting into a new register, and both named the same person as the agent of the shift: Edward O. Wilson. “With his sociobiology,” Ardrey observed, “Harvard’s dynamic E. O. Wilson has published a massive, controversial masterpiece that could easily found a new science.”152 Montagu also cited Wilson in his 1976 book, but as a supporter of his own stance against Ardrey: “As Professor Edward O. Wilson of the Biological Laboratories at Harvard has emphasized, t­ here is no universal aggression instinct.”153 That each claimed Wilson for his own side is noteworthy. Both Ardrey and Montagu seemed aware that the debate had acquired a new champion, this time one with impeccable scientific credentials, in whose hands the debate over h ­ uman nature would become thoroughly transformed. And so it was: in Sociobiology Wilson abandoned all talk of “instincts” and “drives”—­whether aggressive or cooperative—in ­favor of a new discourse of “genes.” In repudiating its scientific terms and concepts, and in fashioning himself as a dif­fer­ent kind of pop­u­lar­izer from Lorenz, Ardrey, and Montagu, Wilson reacted against and made a decisive break from the pop ethology tradition that preceded him. Or at least he tried to. As we w ­ ill see, the past was never ­really past, and the legacy of the aggression debate pursued him. Wilson planted Sociobiology not in virgin soil, but on an already prepared, already polarized battleground.

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CHAPTER SIX

Sociobiology and Pop Ethology Contextualizing E. O. Wilson Popu­lar books came first, well before the popularity of animal-­behavior courses became evident on the campus. . . . ​ I stress the popu­lar roots ­because the apparently sudden interest in animal be­hav­ior cannot be understood if the academic scene is considered in isolation. —­Sherwood Washburn, “­Human Be­hav­ior and the Be­hav­ior of Other Animals”

E

dward Osborne Wilson caught his first glimpse of Konrad Lorenz in the fall of 1953, at Harvard University. With King Solo­ mon’s Ring newly available in En­glish translation and his international reputation on the rise, Lorenz and his fellow ethologist Niko Tinbergen took a United States lecture tour to pre­sent their new science to American audiences, a tour that included a stop at Harvard.1 Wilson was a twenty-­four-­year old gradu­ate student in biology at Harvard and a newly elected ju­nior member of the university’s prestigious Society of Fellows. He had come to Harvard two years ­earlier to study evolutionary biology, ­after completing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the subject at the University of Alabama. Shy and self-­effacing but fiercely ambitious, Wilson was determined to make his mark in science in what­ever way he could, a goal that his fellowship seemed to mandate. The exploration of nature had been Wilson’s passion since childhood. Growing up in the Deep South, mainly Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, he was entranced by the natu­ral world and its creatures—­ snakes, frogs, butterflies, birds, and anything that came from the sea. A childhood accident, however, left him without the vision of one eye and without the ability to gauge distance, and so he gravitated ­toward the 186

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smallest of animals—­those that could be “held between thumb and forefinger and brought close for inspection”: insects, and especially ants.2 By the time he was a college student at the University of Alabama, Wilson had already become a recognized local authority on the fire ant, an invasive pest threatening the state’s agriculture. The anatomy, taxonomy, and geographic distribution of ant species ­were Wilson’s specialties, and he chose to attend Harvard b ­ ecause the university had (through the efforts of William M. Wheeler and Frank M. Carpenter, Wilson’s PhD adviser) amassed the greatest ant collection in the world. In the spring of 1953 Wilson made his first ant-­collecting expedition, a solo research trip to the tropics, Cuba and Mexico.3 The first of the two ethologists to arrive at Harvard that fall, the mild-­mannered Tinbergen, failed to leave much of an impression on Wilson; the young myrmecologist was interested but felt absorbed in other topics. Lorenz, however, was a dif­fer­ent m ­ atter. Wilson listened in rapt fascination as the charismatic Austrian thundered about instinct. “He was a prophet of the dais, passionate, angry, and importunate. He hammered us with phrases soon to become famous in the behavioral sciences: imprinting, ritualization, aggressive drive, overflow; and the names of animals: greylag goose, jackdaw, stickleback.” Even more impor­tant, Wilson realized, “He had come to proclaim a new approach to the study of be­hav­ior. Instinct had been reinstated, he said; the role of learning was greatly overestimated by B.  F. Skinner and other behaviorists; we must now press on in a new direction. He had my complete attention. Still young and very impressionable, I was quick to answer his call to arms.” 4 Lorenz—­a fellow field naturalist—­claimed to have liberated the study of animal be­hav­ior from comparative psy­chol­ogy, particularly from the clutches of behaviorism, and had reinstated it as part of evolutionary biology. Wilson was won over by Lorenz’s concept of fixed action patterns—­genet­ically based, instinctual be­hav­iors that unfolded in response to environmental stimuli—of which each species had its own distinctive repertoire and which could be used for classification just as anatomical parts or physiological reactions could. Wilson was also captivated by the ethologist’s depiction of the landscape of debate: “Lorenz has re­ turned animal be­hav­ior to natu­ral history. My domain. Naturalists, not psy­ chologists with their oversimple white rats and mazes, are the best persons to study animal be­hav­ior.” Instinctual be­hav­ior patterns ­were “biological events”; they ­were not “psychological.”5 Wilson embraced Lorenz’s standard and Lorenz’s version of the playing field and was ready to take on 187

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Lorenz’s opponents. The encounter with Lorenz inspired Wilson to embark on one of the most productive research periods of his early c­ areer: applying the ethological concepts of fixed action patterns, elicitory stimuli, and innate releasing mechanisms to the social be­hav­ior of ants.6 Fast forward to 1969, fifteen years ­later. Now professor of zoology at Harvard, Wilson had exhausted his early research direction and was casting about for a new outlet for his energies. In this frame of mind, he again encountered Lorenzian ethology. This time, however, he came not as an entranced and awestruck acolyte, but as a critic. The occasion was a paper Wilson delivered at a symposium at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, called “Man and Beast.” Convened as the aggression debate was at its height, the symposium sought to address “public demand for critical interpretation of ideas and hunches found in the growing popu­lar lit­er­at­ure on ethology.”7 Wilson took the opportunity to intervene directly into the debate. He staked out a ­middle ground between its two extremes, promised an “objective” and “dispassionate” approach to the study of be­hav­ior, and applied that approach specifically to understanding aggression. His paper outlining this new approach—­his first formal statement of what would come to be sociobiology—­repudiated Lorenzian ethology and the concept of instinct. Two encounters with Lorenz and his science, two diametrically opposed reactions from Wilson at dif­fer­ent points in his ­career. The contrast provokes a basic question: What was the relationship between Wilson and Lorenz and, more generally, between sociobiology and pop ethology? If Wilson’s attitude t­ oward his pre­de­ces­sor in the study of be­ hav­ior changed between 1953 and 1969, is it not pos­si­ble that his stance ­after 1969 continued to shift? Once he launched the proj­ect of sociobiology in 1969, did similar complexity and changeability continue to characterize Wilson’s attitude ­toward ethology? A full picture of the sociobiology / ethology relationship requires examining Wilson’s entire sociobiological oeuvre. His 1975 volume Sociobi­ ology was actually the ­middle volume of a trilogy, preceded in 1971 by The Insect Socie­ties and followed in 1978 by On H ­ uman Nature, the entire series introduced by Wilson’s “Man and Beast” paper, delivered in 1969. Wilson’s “sociobiology,” then, should properly refer to all of t­ hese works, not just the 1975 book. As each installment constructed and expanded the edifice of sociobiology, Wilson’s attitude ­toward ethology changed. The series began by rejecting the concept of instinct and by asserting the objectivity and neutrality of sociobiology: its task was to discover the 188

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manifold forms of animal social be­hav­ior that existed in nature, not to proclaim which was right or which h ­ umans should emulate. Importing such moral and po­liti­cal views into science was, a­ fter all, one of the pop ethologists’ key ­mistakes that Wilson was determined not to repeat. By the end of the series, however, in 1978, as sociobiology itself came ­under attack, Wilson had drawn much closer to the ethologists’ position that moral meaning could indeed be found in nature. Nature provided a guide to how ­human beings should live and how ­human society must be or­ga­nized, and h ­ umans ignored that guidance at their peril. Like ethology, sociobiology had become not just a descriptive science, but a normative one as well. If Wilson’s series started out by asserting a paradigm shift from ethology, it ended by approximating something that looked like continuity.

Wilson and Aggression: The Man and Beast Symposium Planning for the Smithsonian Institution’s Symposium on Man and Beast had begun in the fall of 1966, directly following the publication of On Ag­ gression and The Territorial Imperative. The ornithologist S. Dillon Ripley, then secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and the zoologist John F. Eisenberg suggested a public colloquium to address “the enormous awakening of public and scholarly interest in . . . ​‘the humanity of animals and the bestiality of men.’ ”8 The or­ga­nized and capricious vio­lence of the 1960s seemed to demand systematic comparison of h ­ umans to other animals. Besides Wilson, participants in the 1969 symposium included a roster of distinguished biologists, social scientists, and humanists. Senator William J. Fulbright, intrigued by the potential policy significance of the aggressionists’ theories, also joined the group’s discussions.9 Wilson’s paper, “Competitive and Aggressive Be­hav­ior,” took direct aim at the aggression debate. He cast that debate in its by-­now-­familiar form as a clash of polar opposites: “the popu­lar exponents of ethology” (Ardrey, Lorenz, Morris, and Storr) versus “­those of liberal humanist persuasion,” notably Edmund Leach and Ashley Montagu. Wilson contrasted the pop ethologists’ view that “our sins are only animal sins (original sin if you wish) and that we are no more than naked apes” to their critics’ supposed complete denial of instincts or drives and their condemnation of “facile” animal / ­human analogies. He decried Raymond Dart’s invocation of the “blood-­bespattered, slaughter-­gutted archives of h ­ uman history” as “obviously bad anthropology, bad ethology, and even bad 189

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g­ e­ne­tics.”10 But Wilson thought it equally wrong “to accept cheerfully the extreme opposite view, espoused by many psychologists, that aggressiveness is only a neurosis brought out by abnormal circumstances.”11 In between ­these extremes, Wilson claimed to take a ­middle way, promising an “objective” and “dispassionate” approach to the study of animal and ­human be­hav­ior.12 To what extent was man just another animal, and to what extent was aggression part of his behavioral repertoire, as it was for other animals? This was the ethologists’ question, but Wilson proposed an approach that would give a more precise answer than the ethologists had managed. The approach had two components. First, Wilson aimed to create a cross-­species cata­log of social be­hav­ior—­the method already employed by the ethologists—­but he i­ magined expanding exponentially the number and type of species included in the cata­log. Unlike Lorenz, who settled on a few favored fish and bird species and tended to focus observation on a few individuals, Wilson took literally the entire animal kingdom ­under his purview, from barnacles and insects to apes and h ­ umans, and every­thing in between: a breadth of vision that prefigured his approach in Sociobiology. Second, Wilson proposed to assess exactly where man belonged in this species cata­log. By examining how traits varied across the species cata­log, he could gauge how rapidly ­those traits had changed over the course of evolution. A trait found to be highly variable among species had prob­ably under­gone rapid evolution, and thus would not be widely shared among less closely related species. Pre­sent day variability offered a win­dow into the past. As he put it, “if characteristics evolve so quickly as to shift markedly in the course of evolution at the species level, then extrapolation to the genus level or higher in the taxonomic scale is risky and prob­ably worthless.”13 Instead of arbitrarily locating ­humans “as a point on a subjective curve,” as the ethologists had supposedly done, Wilson used the species cata­log to reconstruct evolutionary history. By considering the variability of traits, Wilson found that competition was “widespread but not universal in animal species.”14 Competition among members of the same species arose as a means of regulating population growth, only u ­ nder certain environmental conditions. When overcrowding increased and resource shortages grew severe, competition occurred to cut back the population. But competition was not the only option: it could be forestalled by other noncompetitive culling mechanisms, such as emigration out of the territory or predation, or even by an 190

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external mechanism like harsh weather. And even when competition did occur, it did not always manifest as direct aggression, such as outright fighting; other forms of competition for resources ­were pos­si­ble. Competition was therefore what Wilson called a “density-­dependent ­factor”: it arose only when the conditions w ­ ere right, and even when they w ­ ere, its appearance was not inevitable. Rather than the Lorenzians’ universal, ineradicable, nonnegotiable aggression instinct, Wilson saw competition and aggression as flaring up only when they helped organisms to adapt to their environment.15 In emphasizing such adaptationist reasoning, Wilson injected an ele­ment of change over time into Lorenz’s static worldview.16 The ethologist contended that instinctive be­hav­ior patterns w ­ ere intricately fitted to their proper releasers—as locks made to turn only in response to one perfectly suited key—­and any deviation from that norm meant degradation and devolution. But Wilson envisioned a more dynamic picture. Behavioral patterns could evolve in response to a changing environment, as species adapted to the requirements of their ecological niches. For Lorenz, instinctive be­hav­ior patterns must burst out and be discharged when the hydraulic pressure became g­ reat enough, even in inappropriate circumstances. Wilson, on the other hand, replaced inevitability with contingency and optimization: one could not deduce a species’ aggressiveness without knowing the circumstances to which it was adapted, and t­ hose circumstances changed over time. In questioning the universality and inevitability of competition and aggression, Wilson repudiated Lorenz’s entire conception of instinct. Wilson disputed Lorenz’s theory of ritualization as well. For Lorenz, the classic image of the wolf baring its jugular before the aggressor in order to redirect or defuse the attack carried an impor­tant message for mankind. But Wilson, drawing from his vast species cata­log, denied that the “killing of members of the same species is never a normal event in nature.” Using examples of fighting and cannibalism in ants and wasps, Wilson dismissed Lorenz’s belief in the neutralization of aggression by ritualization as “a purely empirical generalization about vertebrates, one that cannot be extended to the rest of the animal kingdom.” Again the pop ethologists’ habit of careless extrapolation came u ­ nder fire. Wilson’s stance also blocked the moral lesson that Lorenz had drawn from animals: if ritualization was not an animal law, t­here was nothing for ­humans to learn from it. “­There are no universal ‘rules of conduct’ in competitive be­hav­ior,” Wilson declared. “Species are entirely opportunistic. 191

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Their be­hav­ior patterns do not conform to any innate restrictions but are guided, like all other biological traits, solely by what happens to be advantageous over a period of time sufficient for evolution to occur.”17 Wilson had a dif­fer­ent explanation from Lorenz’s about why pacificism was, for the most part, the rule among animals. Even in species that did compete, overt aggression was usually avoided. Again adaptationism— not a universal law of ritualization—­provided a guide. In spending time being aggressive, animals took time away from other activities, such as courtship, finding food, and rearing young. An aggressor could also inadvertently fight against an unrecognized ge­ne­tic relative, thereby lowering its inclusive fitness—­the genes it shared in common with relatives. Aggressiveness was certainly a “genet­ically programed” trait, subject to evolution by natu­ral se­lection, and providing adaptive advantage to certain species in certain environmental circumstances. But it did not follow that it was therefore ubiquitous, universal, and inevitable. It could be “expected to be programed in such a way as to be brought into play only when it gives a momentary advantage.”18 In order to bolster his argument for adaptationism and optimization, Wilson needed to show the variability of competitive and aggressive be­ hav­iors in a range of dif­fer­ent environmental conditions. To illustrate how aggressive be­hav­ior varied in response to varying circumstances, Wilson moved easily from “well fed honeybee colonies” to snowy owls to adult hippopotami to baboon groups to cats to ­humans, all in the course of a ­couple of paragraphs. In low population densities, t­ here might be no aggression at all; at moderate densities, a mild form like territorial defense might emerge; at still higher densities, territorialism and dominance hierarchies might become more pronounced; and fi­nally, at extremely high densities, the system might disintegrate into social pathology, as demonstrated by overcrowded rats and “­people in concentration and prisoner of war camps.” The evident variability in populations over time, and across the wide range of species considered, helped support the adaptationist claim: “Each of the vari­ous degrees of aggressiveness is adaptive at an appropriate level of population density.”19 In his “Man and Beast” paper Wilson extended his dynamic view to ­human evolution. Instead of assuming that ­human nature had been set in stone at some point in the distant past—­stalled out in Pleistocene hunting and killing mode, and now out of synch with modern civilization—­ Wilson argued that h ­ uman biological evolution could occur relatively

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rapidly and over comparatively recent periods. Even if the Australopithecines had been bloodthirsty killers, “would it follow,” Wilson asked, that their traits “persisted as a ge­ne­tic legacy into civilized times? The answer is no.” Se­lection pressures, however slight, arising in a changing environment, could have pushed the ­human behavioral repertoire in quite a dif­ fer­ent direction, and could have done so since the advent of agriculture and even since the fall of Rome. If aggressiveness had persisted into modern man’s behavioral repertoire, it was due less to “Pleistocene inertia” than to its continuing adaptiveness in current contexts. This is what Wilson meant when he said that “it seems inevitable that man makes himself genet­ically as he goes along.”20 Wilson also drained the science of ­human nature of any moral import. ­There was for him no ultimate meaning in nature, no lessons to be learned from animal socie­ties or from protohuman ancestors, or from the unexpected twists and turns, the contingencies, of behavioral evolution. Evolution was not a guide to right and good conduct, as it was for Lorenz: adaptation to one’s ecological niche did not mean one was necessarily happy in that niche. “It is pos­si­ble to be unhappy and very adaptive,” Wilson wrote.21 He offered no easy answers to the symposium organizers’ concern: the prob­lem of 1960s vio­lence. If the goal was to decrease h ­ uman aggression, the only way to do so was to arrange the conditions so that aggressive be­hav­ior became nonadaptive. Despite his claim to reject both “extremes” of the aggression debate, in one re­spect Wilson’s stance came much closer Lorenz’s than it ever came to Montagu’s side. In order for behavioral traits like aggression to be subject to evolution by natu­ral se­lection, they had to be heritable—­that is, variance in such traits had to be a result at least in part of ge­ne­tic variance. Without this ge­ne­tic basis, natu­ral se­lection would have nothing to grab onto. “­There exists abundant evidence,” Wilson asserted, “that many of the most impor­tant mea­sur­able behavioral characteristics do possess moderately high heritability,” including introversion / extroversion mea­ sures, neuroticism, dominance, and depression. “Obviously ­human genes have surrendered a ­great deal, but perhaps they have kept a ­little of their old heritability and responsiveness to se­lection”—an amount that should be mea­sured, Wilson added, since it was “crucial” to f­ uture social planning.22 In his insistence that be­hav­ior must have a ge­ne­tic basis, Wilson’s position stood very far indeed from Montagu’s belief that h ­ uman be­hav­ior was largely a cultural product.

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Ardrey and Wilson in Conflict Wilson’s rejection of Lorenz’s instinct concept and of the notion of indelible ­human aggression raised Ardrey’s ire. Having read Wilson’s “Man and Beast” symposium paper in preprint, Ardrey lambasted it in his 1970 book The Social Contract. Wilson, in turn, responded to Ardrey’s critique in the final published version of his paper. In The Social Contract, Ardrey disputed the narrowness of Wilson’s conception of aggression and broadened its meaning even beyond Lorenz’s aggression instinct. Ardrey took Wilson to task for denying that competition was common among animals and for maintaining that it arose as a “density-­dependent phenomenon” only in times of shortage. Wilson’s was “a premise of Triassic obsolescence leading logically to the conclusion that competition is infrequent in the animal world. The conclusion,” Ardrey continued, “lent biology’s endorsement to environmentalism’s tattered dream”—­that h ­ uman beings ­were blank slates on which circumstance imposed its dictates. It was no surprise, Ardrey thought, that Wilson’s paper was the one at the symposium “most frequently quoted in the sentimental American press.”23 Ardrey classed Wilson with ethology’s opponents: the “environmentalists.” In contrast to this view, Ardrey depicted aggression as an elemental, ubiquitous force of nature: its origins could be discerned in the pro­cess of differentiation of the fertilized egg, and it persisted as the individual grew, developed, sought to separate itself from its fellows, and fulfill its own potential. Ardrey defined any sort of self-­assertive, striving be­hav­ior as aggression—­and this pervasive drive ensured that competition would be an ever-­ present feature of both animal and ­human be­hav­ior. “It is the inborn force that stimulates the hickory tree . . . ​to rise above its fellows. . . . ​It is the force, brooking no contradiction, directing the elephant calf to grow up, the baby starfish to grow out, the infant mamba to grow long.” Ardrey waxed rhapsodic on the power of this force: “We seek the sun. We pursue the wind. We attain the mountaintop and ­there, dusted with stars, we say to ourselves, now I know why I was born. . . . ​Or we achieve a transcendent vision of heaven and earth and God. . . . ​All is aggression.”24 Such an irrepressible and inherent force could not be conceived simply as dependent on the ecological circumstances that surrounded it. According to the “Lorenzian princi­ple,” in the absence of such an inborn force, survival would become impossible. 194

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In the postscript to his “Man and Beast” paper, Wilson criticized Ardrey for conflating two dif­fer­ent levels of competition: competition between alleles, the basis for natu­ral se­lection, and aggression between individual organisms, which Wilson called “ecological competition.” The one did not necessarily imply the other, and allelic competition could and did occur without competition on the overt, ecological level. Ardrey’s “grasp of ecol­ogy is somewhat less firm than his grasp of sociobiology,” Wilson acidly observed.25 At stake in this disagreement over aggression, competition, and the concept of instinct was the meaning of group se­lection. Both Wilson and Ardrey believed in the possibility of group se­lection: that a population, as a bounded, defined entity, could be the unit on which natu­ral se­lection operated, and that an individual’s own aggressiveness must sometimes be subordinated to the interests of the group.26 But the two writers differed on what held groups together. Wilson defined the “group” by reference to ge­ne­tics: individuals would sacrifice themselves for the group to the extent that they shared genes with other group members. Drawing on William Hamilton’s concept of “inclusive fitness,” Wilson reasoned that an individual would control his aggressiveness against genet­ically related kin, b ­ ecause the individual shared genes with the relative and damage to a relative lessened the frequency in the gene pool of t­ hose shared genes. Wilson reasoned further that an individual’s aggression would also be held in check by the risk that his hostility might inadvertently be directed against an unrecognized relative.27 Thus even the possibility of ge­ne­tic relatedness provided a rationale to clamp down on aggressiveness. Such a possibility held groups together and induced individuals to act for the greater good even in cases where ge­ne­tic relatedness became extremely attenuated, as it did in the insect socie­ties. For Ardrey, on the other hand, it was not shared genes (or the possibility of shared genes) but shared social conventions that held a group together. All the members of a group accepted certain rules of be­hav­ior for the sake of group survival. T ­ hese rules included maintenance of and devotion to a territory, with aggression directed outward, beyond the territorial borders; observation of dominance hierarchies, in which each individual knew his place; and participation in the sexual division of ­labor, in which males hunted and females stayed home to raise the young. Playing by the rules and keeping competition from spilling over ­these established conventional bounds helped keep population size low—­not the limits of food supply itself. Drawing on V. C. Wynne-­Edwards’s concept 195

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of group se­lection, Ardrey argued that groups self-­regulated in the interest of maintaining their integrity.28 “Male animals do not compete for such direct rewards as food or females,” Ardrey claimed. “They compete for symbols, like territory or high rank in a hierarchy. . . . ​The gaining of such symbolic prizes—­limited in number—­pre­sents the successful competitor with prior access to food or females.”29 While for Wilson, competition among members of a group was for material resources, mostly food, “the ultimate limiting resource,” for Ardrey “the goals of almost all animal competition exist not in the material environment but in the behavioral environment of the animal population itself.”30 It followed from Ardrey’s conception of shared conventions or rules of be­hav­ior that social order must run very deep in the animal world. Society and its conventions ­were not something imposed on ­human beings as on a blank slate: society was, in ­every sense of the word, natu­ral, arising out of animal groups, its strictures inherent and basically unchangeable. Ardrey’s title, The Social Contract, made an ironic bow to Jean-­Jacques Rousseau; while the Enlightenment phi­los­o­pher argued that man was by nature innocent and good, solitary and asocial, a noble savage whom the laws of civilization only l­ ater corrupted, the pop ethologist held that the rules of social order w ­ ere as old as nature itself. Ardrey traced the origins of the sexual division of l­ abor, a feature of modern society, deep into the protohuman past. To stalk and kill large animals, Australopithecines had to gather in small, tightly or­ga­nized, all-­male bands, in which co­ operation and communication ­were at a premium and subordination of individual interests to the group an absolute necessity. “Social obligation”—­ knowing one’s place and what one owed to the whole—­“was born on the African savannah long before the coming of the enlarged brain. The hunting band killed for the group, not just for itself.”31 Social order was a natu­ral outcome of the inherent drives ­toward competition and aggression. Such cross-­species identity of be­hav­ior was antithetical to Wilson’s evolutionary conception. For Wilson, the only “rule” of be­hav­ior was what proved most advantageous to members of a species in a given environment. What­ever helped an individual and his genet­ically related (or possibly related) kin to increase the frequency of their genes in the next generation would be the be­hav­iors that got selected. As the environmental par­ameters changed, dif­fer­ent be­hav­iors might very well come to be adaptive. Other­wise t­ here ­were no unbending rules. Wilson and Ardrey also differed on the kind of discipline that could encompass the study of animal and ­human be­hav­ior. For Wilson, the as196

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cendance of the pop ethologists showed that “we are in grave need of a truly scientific and power­ful anthropology”—­a science that would bring together behavioral ge­ne­tics (“the study of the hereditary behavioral traits that affect culture”) and primate ecol­ogy (the study of the variability of primate social systems). Only such a synthesis of biological disciplines—­the very synthesis he would pre­sent in Sociobiology—­would eliminate the “guesswork” from comparisons between man and beast.32 Meanwhile, Ardrey opened and concluded The Social Contract by “indicting” elite scientists for their exclusive grip on the sciences of ­human nature. “Science, for the im­mense majority of the h ­ uman species, represents our Delphic shrine. We worship it. We consult its oracles. We presume miracles. . . . ​A ­temple exists, acceptable to the broad majority of men and nations, commanding authority once monopolized by gods. H ­ ere is the meeting place from which a body of common assumptions might emerge. But,” Ardrey complained, “too much cannot be expected of the scientist, for he is a specialist.”33 In its hyper-­specialization, science had failed in its public mission. “Like a priest conducting his mass in Latin,” the scientist “pre­sents his conclusions in a jargon that the most intelligent layman cannot translate and thus most unhappily cannot question.”34 Instead of more specialized knowledge, a dif­fer­ent sort of discipline was necessary to answer the questions about ­human nature and ­human society that the sciences could not: an “evolutionary philosophy”—­a discipline that would make meaning out of scientific facts, as Ardrey’s books claimed to.35 As the 1969–1970 exchange indicated, Wilson’s divergence from the pop ethologists was at this point at its most extreme. They differed not only on theoretical issues such as the meaning of aggression, but in their attitudes t­ oward science as well. While Wilson called for truer and more power­ful science, Ardrey called for wiser and more applicable philosophy. While Wilson blamed pop­ul­ar­izers for promulgating comforting but problematic claims, Ardrey indicted professional specialists for failing to comprehend the ­human implications of their findings. Wilson’s “Man and Beast” paper contained in microcosm all the ­ele­ments that went into creating sociobiology. The species cata­log, ­documenting the enormous variability of animal social be­hav­ior; the endorsement of adaptationism, optimization, and ecological contingency as fundamental themes of evolution; and the appeal to population ge­ne­ tics, in which all be­hav­ior had to be understood from the perspective of the genes—­all reappeared, in expanded form, in the 1975 Sociobiology. 197

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Sociobiology as a field is often understood as having coalesced around the question of the evolution of altruism: how could the trait of self-­sacrifice have evolved in a world in which ge­ne­tic self-­preservation was of the utmost value? This was the prob­lem that Hamilton’s conception of inclusive fitness and Robert Trivers’s conception of reciprocal altruism aimed to solve.36 Wilson’s contribution to the Smithsonian volume, however, shows that he approached sociobiology from a dif­fer­ent starting point. For Wilson, it was the prob­lem of aggression—­and not altruism, to which he came only ­later—­that was the whetstone on which he sharpened the edges of his sociobiology.37

Group Se­lection and Insect Society In The Insect Socie­ties, published in November 1971 by Harvard University Press, Wilson continued the sociobiological proj­ect begun in the “Man and Beast” paper.38 He created a comparative cata­log of insect be­hav­ior, surveying the anatomy, physiology, and ways of life of an array of social insects, including ants, bees, wasps, and termites. He considered more types of be­hav­ior, not just competition and aggression, but the entire range of sensory and m ­ ental capacities in insects, and their modes of communication (including via chemicals, the line of research he had begun in the 1950s). The arrangement of castes and the division of ­labor in insect socie­ ties, in such tasks as reproduction, food gathering, nest building, and defense of territory, w ­ ere likewise key themes. Variability of be­hav­ior among the dif­fer­ent species was stressed, and the point was always to show the adaptiveness of the be­hav­iors to the ecological conditions. Why, Wilson asked, ­were hymenopteran insects (bees, ants, and wasps) social? Why w ­ ere they not simply loners; what advantages did sociality confer, and what held their socie­ties together? Wilson rejected the notion of the “superorganism,” according to which individuals banded together in selfless devotion to something larger than themselves, much as cells did in an organism. The concept was inherently vague, much like Wynne-­Edwards’s “group.” Though it had channeled research productively, Wilson said, the concept ended up being a “mirage,” offering no techniques, mea­sure­ments, or definitions by which ge­ne­tics, be­hav­ior, and physiology could be unraveled. That Ardrey had “melodramatically championed” the superorganism concept did not help recommend it to Wilson.39 Instead, as he had at the “Man and Beast” symposium, Wilson explained group cohesion by reference to population biology. 198

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A key but unusual feature of hymenopteran reproductive biology is haplodiploidy, a mode of sex determination in which males are produced from unfertilized (that is, haploid) eggs and females from fertilized (diploid) eggs.40 All the truly social insects reproduce by haplodiploidy, and Wilson suggested a causal connection between this mode of reproduction and the tendency to be social by drawing on Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness. ­Under normal circumstances, the offspring of two diploid parents inherit half of their ge­ne­tic endowment from each parent. But a male born from a haploid egg produces genet­ically identical, homozygous sperm; when he mates with a diploid female, all their ­daughters receive an identical ge­ne­tic contribution from their ­father, along with half of their ­mother’s genes. As a result, ­sisters born of the same ­father (and ­mother) actually share more of their ge­ne­tic endowment with each other (.75) than they do with their own offspring (.50). The ­sisters can then increase their inclusive fitness to a greater extent by becoming social, by helping their mother rear more of her own ­ ­ daughters—­ more “supersisters” for themselves—­than by having their own offspring. According to Hamilton’s calculus, Wilson figured that ­sisters could actually increase their own fitness by being altruistic in this way more than they could by simply hatching their own broods (with whom they would share only 50 ­percent of their genes). By the same set of par­ameters, ­because males shared fewer genes in common with their own b ­ rothers and s­ isters (.50) than females did with their ­sisters, males should be more selfish than females—­and Wilson found that this was indeed the case. It simply did not “pay” for males to cooperate.41 The idea of inclusive fitness, Wilson admitted, was “so starkly mechanical that my own first reaction to it was to reject it out of hand.” But its reductionist spirit, and the ways in which it produced testable predictions, held strong appeal for him, and he “soon became absorbed in its possibilities.” 42 By the end of the book, Wilson was arguing that the evolution of the social insects and the differences among their socie­ties raised questions that could “only be solved by the modern methods of population biology.” 43 Relying on the princi­ples of inclusive fitness did not mean that Wilson ruled out group se­lection. On the contrary, he stressed that the colony as a w ­ hole could sometimes be considered the unit of se­lection in insect evolution. “Colony se­lection in the advanced social insects,” he wrote, “does appear to be the one example of group se­lection that can be  accepted unequivocally,” the group being the colony itself and not 199

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the larger population of colonies.44 Wilson considered cases of interaction between individual and group se­lection, allowing for example that dominance hierarchies could be explained as a way of dividing up the ­labor of a colony, thus contributing to the fitness of the colony as a w ­ hole. Shifting to a population biology framework did not mean abandoning the ethologists’ focus on group se­lection in ­favor of se­lection focused solely on the individual and the individual’s genes. But it did mean looking at be­hav­ior in a dif­fer­ent light. From the perspective of population biology, what seemed to be the true or under­lying purpose of the be­ hav­ior was revealed: a purpose that might be quite dif­fer­ent from its outward appearance. As Wilson put it, “a behavioral act which on l­imited view appears selfish, or even destructive to ­others, may in fact be seen to be part of a coordinated, largely altruistic be­hav­ior when reviewed as a part of total colony biology.” And, similarly, “another behavioral act, which on first view seems to be altruistic with re­spect to some other individual”—­ such as supersisters cooperating to help their ­mother—­“may be revealed as a competitive device among siblings when reviewed in terms of the theory of inclusive fitness.” 45 The phenomenon of altruism had taken its place beside that of aggression as the key behavioral puzzle to be solved. The last chapter of The Insect Socie­ties, “The Prospect for a Unified Sociobiology,” was Wilson’s first complete statement of his new science. ­Here he sought to make all-­encompassing the comparative, systematic cata­log of species variability and adaptationism that he had proposed at the “Man and Beast” symposium, including all animals from insects to primates. “When the same par­ameters and quantitative theory are used to analyze both termite colonies and troops of rhesus macaques we w ­ ill have a unified science of sociobiology. Can this ever r­ eally happen?” Wilson seemed convinced that it could, that the differences that separated insect from vertebrate did not constitute such a vast gulf ­after all, and that their “functional similarities”—­their tendencies t­ oward cooperation, their defense of territory, their kinship systems, their divisions of l­abor— provided a stable basis for comparison. All t­ hese social be­hav­iors could be subject to the same type of analy­sis at the ge­ne­tic level. ­There ­were, to be sure, impor­tant contrasts. The vertebrate socie­ ties depended on personal recognition of their members as individuals, while the insect socie­ties w ­ ere impersonal. The vertebrate socie­ties specialized in autonomy and freedom for their members, while the insect socie­ties, through rigidly programed division of ­labor, achieved a level of societal efficiency unimaginable and unattainable by the so-­called higher 200

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animals. Making such comparisons might seem to the specialist “facile— or worse.” Still, Wilson argued, it was “out of such deliberate oversimplifications that the beginnings of a general theory are made. The formulation of a theory of sociobiology constitutes, in my opinion, one of the ­great manageable prob­lems of biology for the next twenty or thirty years.” 46 It was as constructor and communicator of this overarching synthesis that Wilson found his métier. The synthesis ­stopped just short of h ­ umans. If the insect socie­ties held any lessons for h ­ uman beings, Wilson did not draw them. The message of his book was not, as the biblical Proverbs recommended, to “go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.” In fact, quite the contrary: ­humans must reject “termite-­like regimentation.” 47 Instead of drawing moral lessons, at this stage of his c­ areer Wilson seemed concerned mostly with the possibility that sociobiology could ultimately become a “single mature science.” With its basis in population biology, sociobiology promised to surmount the “natu­ral history” and “physiology” phases through which ­every science must pass, according to Wilson, and in which ethology was still stuck. The “optimistic prospect” of socio­ biology was to achieve a hypothetico-­deductive structure, “which means that it is built from models designed explic­itly to test and extend our basic assumptions.” 48 Sociobiology could give up the fruitless debates over instinct and learning that hampered the pro­gress of ethology and fi­nally become a truly predictive science, just like the physical sciences. With empirical knowledge or­ga­nized into concepts, consequences deduced, predictions tested through experiments, and the original concepts revised, Wilson left no doubt as to what his image of real science was. Apo­liti­cal, unengaged with the world’s issues, following a strictly defined method, the new science of sociobiology would not confront the same prob­lems that bedev­iled the aggressionists. Wilson and his publisher, Harvard University Press, gave the first installment in Wilson’s planned sociobiology trilogy a distinctive look. The Insect Socie­ties was a massive, coffee-­table volume, printed in double columns and lavishly illustrated. As Sociobiology also would be, the 1971 book was published ­under the Belknap imprint, which Harvard reserved for books of “long lasting importance, superior in scholarship and physical production, chosen w ­ hether or not they might be profitable.” 49 Wilson’s book followed a line of ­earlier Harvard publications in evolution and animal be­hav­ior, including works by Ernst Mayr, Konrad Lorenz, and Karl von Frisch, but its dust jacket read “in the forefront of sociobiology.”50 201

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­ ere was a work worthy of standing alongside the ethologists, but also H breaking new ground. Wilson, the book announced, had now emerged as the premier public spokesman for a new science of animal be­hav­ior. The publicity that The Insect Socie­ties received—­including a prominently placed and highly positive review in the New York Times Book Review— was, however, dwarfed by that which accompanied the publication of Sociobiology.51

Publicizing Sociobiology In June 1975 Harvard University Press published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Its imposing size, twelve-­inch by twelve-­inch dimensions, five pound weight, and 697 double-­columned pages of text conveyed scientific heft and seriousness, and Wilson typically emphasized that most of the book—­the twenty-­five chapters on animal socie­ties—­were strictly scientific and uncontroversial. (Only the first and last chapters, on ­human be­hav­ior, he conceded, courted controversy.) Pages of mathematical equations in many of the chapters reinforced the impression, as did Wilson’s establishment of the canons of good science in an early chapter, which he contrasted with the aggressionists’ “advocacy method.” On the other hand, the book was also a popularization, intended not just for specialists or even just other scientists. Despite its formidable technical detail, Wilson wrote it to be understandable by laypeople, including a chapter on the basics of population biology and a glossary, so that it be could comprehended, for the most part, “with full understanding by any intelligent person ­whether or not he or she has had formal training in science.”52 The book’s multitude of illustrations, particularly the exquisite, double-­page-­spread drawings by Sarah Landry, also featured on the cover of the original edition, enhanced its popu­lar appeal. As each drawing portrayed the members of an animal (and, in the last chapter, protohuman) society in busy activity, the effect was like looking at a natu­ral history museum diorama, an experience familiar to the lay reader (figure 6.1). Its publication occurred at a pregnant moment for the press. In 1972, Harvard University Press had acquired a new director who was to rescue it ­after years of financial decline, even crisis. Arthur J. Rosenthal was a successful New York publisher with an eye for serious books that would also be big sellers.53 In Rosenthal’s view, a university press served “an academic function,” but also had to run “as if it ­were a business.”54 Knowledge 202

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6.1  A diorama-­like “speculative reconstruction” of the life of early man

(Homo habilis). The all-­male band is pictured in the act of driving rival predators away from a dead elephant-­like dinothere. From chapter 27 of Wilson’s Sociobiology (pp. 570–571). Drawing by Sarah Landry.

and profit ­were not incompatible, and Sociobiology fit the bill. Rosenthal was acutely aware of a huge popu­lar reading audience hungry for stories of man’s animal ancestry, for he had been recommended to Harvard by none other than Simon Michael Bessie of Atheneum, Ardrey’s publisher.55 In Rosenthal’s hands, Harvard took control of the machinery of popularization, already set in motion by the pop ethologists, and made it work for sociobiology. The press ran an advertising blitz for what was expected to be a blockbuster. Three weeks before Sociobiology appeared on bookstore shelves, a long front-­page article in the New York Times by Boyce Rensberger announced its publication.56 Full-­page advertisements in the popu­lar media proclaimed the book “indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the ­human situation” (figure 6.2).57 Both before and ­after his book appeared, Wilson himself actively courted and embraced the popu­lar media, just as the pop ethologists had before him, and before the debate over Sociobiology forced him to. He proved ­adept at using popularization to strategically advance his own ends, writing articles in science magazines and thought pieces for newspapers, and granting interviews in ­People magazine and House and Garden.58 Although he aimed at the same broad audience that was reading the pop ethologists, he presented sociobiology as a very dif­fer­ent kind of 203

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6.2  A coupon that could be used to order a copy of Sociobiology from

Barnes & Noble Bookstores, published in the New York Times on July 27, 1975.

science from theirs. While pop ethology had come bearing warnings for ­human society, Wilson pitched sociobiology as value-­free and apo­liti­cal. In a 1977 article in the New York Times, for example, Wilson stressed the “unique qualities of anatomy and be­hav­ior” in h ­ uman beings that drove them “far apart from the remainder of the animal kingdom.”59 Wilson also projected an image of himself in the popu­lar media that was as dif­fer­ent as pos­si­ble from that of the aggressionists. In striking contrast to the showman-­turned-­prophet Lorenz, the flamboyant and overreaching Ardrey, even that professorial familiar of the talk-­show cir­ cuit, Montagu, Wilson appeared as a highly credentialed, professional 204

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specialist, a scientist’s scientist. Newspaper articles presented Wilson as “bespectacled, soft-­spoken, and scholarly,” a “Harvard professor . . . ​far more at home in his laboratory, surrounded by trays of the busy ants that are his scientific specialty, than he is mixing it up in public debates or being interviewed on the T ­ oday Show.” 60 Ironically, perhaps, Wilson used popu­lar media to proj­ect an image of himself as a publicity-­averse ivory tower academic. Nevertheless, despite his claims to purity, Wilson’s use in ­these popu­lar articles of morally freighted terms to describe animals suggested that his science, like pop ethology, did in fact contain h ­ uman implications. In a Scientific American article published in June 1975, the same month as Sociobiology, he applied the term “slavery” to ants: “The slave-­making ants offer a close and in­ter­est­ing case of behavioral evolution, but the analogies with h ­ uman be­hav­ior are much too remote to allow us to find in them any moral or po­liti­cal lesson.” 61 Even while denying any connection to ­human slavery, Wilson used a term with obvious po­liti­cal connotations. In October 1975, a few months ­after the publication of his book, Wilson sought in the New York Times Magazine scrupulously to avoid “a dangerous trap in sociobiology . . . ​the naturalistic fallacy of ethics.” What­ ever the ge­ne­tic heritage of our “Pleistocene hunter-­gatherer existence,” it could not be used “to justify a continuing practice in pre­sent and f­ uture socie­ties”—­such a justification would be “bad biology.” In the preceding paragraphs, however, Wilson had said that in hunter-­gatherer socie­ties, “men hunt and ­women stay at home,” a “strong bias,” likely ge­ne­tic in origin, that would prob­ably persist “even in the most ­free and most egalitarian of ­future socie­ties.” 62 Again, the normative implication and the denial of it existed side by side. Even as he stressed the purity of the science and its difference in ­every way from pop ethology, Wilson’s public statements at the launch of Sociobiology showed that he had already begun to advance ­toward a normative science of h ­ uman nature.

The New Synthesis As its subtitle indicated, Sociobiology staked a claim to add the sciences of social be­hav­ior to the “modern synthesis”—­the mid-­twentieth-­century theoretical combination of Mendelian ge­ne­tics and Darwinian natu­ral se­ lection made pos­si­ble by the advent of mathematical population ge­ne­tics. According to this overarching neo-­Darwinian theory, natu­ral se­lection— working on hereditary, incremental variations—­was the primary cause 205

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of evolutionary change, and the adaptive significance of each trait or feature could be assessed according to the princi­ples of population ge­ne­tics, in terms of changing gene frequencies over time.63 By the ­middle of the twentieth c­ entury, most of the biological disciplines—­systematics, paleontology, cytoge­ne­tics, botany, ecology—­had been integrated in the synthesis.64 Wilson aimed to bring the sciences of social be­hav­ior into the synthesis as well, since be­hav­ior was just as genet­ically based and just as much a product of natu­ral se­lection as any other physical trait. “It may not be too much to say,” Wilson wrote at the beginning of Sociobi­ ology, “that sociology and the other social sciences, as well as the humanities, are the last branches of biology waiting to be included in the Modern Synthesis.” 65 Wilson thus foresaw an even more audacious and overarching synthesis than the neo-­Darwinist one: a unification of all behavioral phenomena—­potentially even including art, philosophy, and the highest reaches of h ­ uman nature—­under the aegis of evolutionary biology. Hence, sociobiology as the “new synthesis.” Wilson told his publicist at the press that the subtitle indicated that the book was to be much more than just a textbook.66 Sociobiology was in fact one long argument, for a new view of animal be­hav­ior and for a new standard of science. Wilson defined sociobiology as the systematic study of the biological basis of social be­hav­ior in animals and man. Each phrase in the definition carried weight. Systematic study: the book made a cata­log of an array of animal species, even vaster than that in The Insect Socie­ties; it was not focused on a few favored species as Lorenzian ethology was. Wilson had concluded The Insect Socie­ties in 1971 by envisioning a science of be­hav­ior stretching from the insects to the nonhuman primates, stopping just short of man. Now, in 1975, the opening pages of Sociobiology extended the “new synthesis” one deliberate step further. Wilson’s science would include “early man” and “the more primitive con­temporary h ­ uman socie­ties.” 67 Biological basis: Wilson shifted the focus from the level of the w ­ hole organism to the level of the gene. Biological meant ge­ne­tic. In the very first paragraph Wilson explained that “in a Darwinian sense the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and serves as their temporary carrier.” 68 Be­hav­ior had to be interpreted from the “gene’s-­eye view”; what the animal did should be seen as the gene’s way of increasing its frequency in the next generation.69 Social be­hav­ior: all the activities that animals pursued in relationship to other animals fell ­under Wilson’s purview, and he sought, as in 206

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The Insect Socie­ties, to classify be­hav­ior into broad categories (communication; aggression, territory, and dominance; sex, reproduction, and ­parental care; symbiosis among dif­f er­ent species) and look for cross-­species similarities. He began Sociobiology with the same bold contention that had ended The Insect Socie­ties: the search for common properties linking other­wise vastly dif­fer­ent species, and their interpretation in the language of population biology, was the mission of a “unified science of sociobiology.”70 The book was divided into three parts. The first set out the concepts of sociobiology: the degrees of sociality by which an animal society could be assessed (group, population, colony, society), and the analytical tools of population biology, principally the idea of adaptation (adjustment over time to the exigencies of the environment) and of behavioral scaling (variation in be­hav­ior within a species). The second part categorized be­ hav­ior into broad types. And the third part ascended the g­ reat chain of being, analyzing the manifestations and forms of social organ­ization in each animal species, staring with invertebrates and culminating in chapter  27, “Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology.” In Wilson’s gene-­ centric view, any be­hav­ior that favored the transmission of an organism’s genes into the next generation would come to characterize the species. As he had in The Insect Socie­ties, Wilson presented the evolution of altruistic be­hav­ior as the central prob­lem for sociobiology—­those be­hav­ iors that by their very definition promoted the survival of ­others at the altruist’s own expense. The answer to the puzzle was kinship: if the altruist shared genes with t­ hose it was helping, and if by its act t­ hose shared genes gained greater repre­sen­ta­tion in the next generation, “the propensity for altruism would spread through the gene pool.”71 But the emphasis on kinship did not mean that Wilson ruled out the possibility of group se­lection. As in The Insect Socie­ties, in Sociobiology too Wilson complemented individual and kin se­lection with group se­ lection. While he was critical of Wynne-­Edwards, and the claim that animals voluntarily limit their own fitness (their own survivorship and the number of offspring they produce) in order to benefit their society as a ­whole, Wilson nevertheless maintained that u ­ nder certain circumstances an entire group could act as the unit of se­lection.72 Group or “interdemic” se­lection (in which be­hav­iors that benefited whole-­group survival came to characterize the species) and kin se­lection (in which be­hav­iors ­were favored that principally benefited the individual and her immediate offspring) ­were, in his view, the extreme ends of a continuum. Social 207

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be­hav­ior could often be ­shaped by a mixture of the two types of se­lection, and each prevailed to dif­fer­ent extents in dif­fer­ent species. Self-­restraint on the part of entire populations, Wilson wrote—­true “group se­lection”—­was prob­ably least likely in large, stable populations, the ones with the most highly developed social be­hav­ior.73 But as conditions changed, so could the mode of se­lection: “A mechanism for the evolution of population-­wide cooperation has been validated, and the hypothesis of social conventions must ­either be excluded or kept alive for each species considered in turn.”74 Changes in a population’s limits and its size could serve to slide it up and down the kin / interdemic se­lection scale, and where a species fell along that continuum had to be de­cided on a case-­by-­case basis. Wilson gave the example of voluntary population control in parasites as a promising situation for the operation of group se­ lection. “It may stretch credulity to think of an altruistic bacterium or a self-­sacrificing blood-­fluke, but in the sense that feeding ability or reproduction is curtailed in spite of competition from other genotypes, a parasite can be altruistic.”75 Wilson also considered se­lection at the level of the colony to be a pervasive form of group se­lection in insects: insect caste evolved to truly work for the good of the ­whole.76 Wilson concluded his chapter on group se­lection by reevaluating altruistic be­hav­ior in animals in light of the theories of individual se­ lection, kin se­lection, and interdemic se­lection. He ended with Lorenz’s iconic example of ritualized aggression: the wild dog exposing its neck, or groveling belly up, in a show of submission before the aggressor, who then refrained from g­ oing in for the kill. “The kindness shown an e­ nemy seems altruistic, an unnecessary risk of personal fitness.” If such altruism ­were truly for the good of the species, it would require “interdemic se­ lection of a high intensity.”77 Wilson tested out the other two main explanations for altruism on Lorenz’s example: kin se­lection (but this theory would hold only if the two animals w ­ ere closely related); and individual se­lection (according to which the animal uses behavioral scaling to select the most appropriate response, depending on the conditions, from a range of possibilities. Scaling was adaptive b ­ ecause it would be disadvantageous to an animal to react in the same ste­reo­typed way in all situations.) Wilson presented ­these three explanations as three equally plausible alternatives, however, and did not choose among them. Wilson did not wholly reject group se­lection, and thus did not make a clean break with ethology on that score. Sociobiology’s divergences from ethology lay elsewhere. One key point of difference was, as in the “Man 208

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and Beast” paper, to replace Lorenzian typology with population thinking.78 For Lorenz, an animal’s instinctive be­hav­ior patterns, once matured, ­were invariant and common to the species. Wilson, on the other hand, emphasized the variability of social be­hav­ior, both across species and within them, and its continuing adaptability to ever-­changing circumstances.79 No adaptation was ever “perfect,” and animals even of the same species could develop varying responses to what­ever set of environmental circumstances they faced. Be­hav­ior was less a ­matter of ste­ reo­typed response and more a kaleidoscopic array. As Wilson put it, “No organism is ever perfectly adapted. Nearly all the relevant par­ameters of its environment shift constantly. . . . ​The organism must track t­ hese parts of its environment with some precision, yet it can never hope to respond correctly to e­ very one of the multifactorial twists and turns—­only to come close enough to survive for a ­little while and reproduce as well as most.”80 Variability allowed dif­fer­ent individual responses to be compared, and comparisons between individuals meant that relative contributions of heredity and environment to be­hav­ior could be determined. Lorenz’s typology, by contrast, without any such expectation of variability, brought along with it no such capacity for comparison, and was, therefore, according to Wilson, incapable of being made precise.81 In discarding Lorenz’s concept of instinct, Wilson foresaw a wholesale disciplinary reor­ga­ni­za­tion in which ethology would be eliminated as the key science of be­hav­ior and sociobiology elevated in its place. “The conventional wisdom,” Wilson wrote, “speaks of ethology, which is the naturalistic study of ­whole patterns of animal be­hav­ior, and its companion enterprise, comparative psy­chol­ogy, as the central, unifying fields of behavioral biology. They are not; both are destined to be cannibalized by neurophysiology . . . ​from one end and sociobiology and behavioral ecol­ogy from the other.”82 Leaving his prediction in no doubt, a series of diagrams showed ethology shrinking over time to subordinate status, while neurophysiology, on the one hand, and sociobiology, firmly based in population ge­ne­tics, on the other, grew to overshadow it (figure 6.3). “I hope not too many scholars in ethology and comparative psy­ chol­ogy ­will be offended by this vision” of their scientific destiny, Wilson wryly remarked. He made it clear that sociobiology was much sounder science than ethology. “The f­ uture cannot be with the ad hoc terminology, crude models, and curve fitting that characterize most con­temporary ethology and comparative psy­chol­ogy,” he explained.83 209

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6.3  The diagrams from Wilson’s Sociobiology showing how ethology would be “cannibalized” over time (p. 6, quote p. 7).

A section of chapter 2, titled “Reasoning in Sociobiology,” set out Wilson’s standards for good science and presented a scathing critique of popu­lar ethology. “Real theory,” Wilson asserted, was “postulational-­ deductive,” following the premises of “strong inference.” Several dif­ fer­ent alternative hypotheses w ­ ere proposed, their par­ameters defined as rigorously and quantitatively as pos­si­ble; crucial experiments ­were devised that would exclude one or more of them; ­those found wanting ­were 210

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rejected. Real theory must be testable. “Its results are often nonobvious or even counterintuitive. The impor­tant t­ hing is that they exceed the capacity of unaided intuition.”84 By contrast, the pop ethologists followed “the advocacy method” in their attempts at science, using persuasion and “verbal skill” to make their stories stick. Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, Elaine Morgan, Desmond Morris, and Robert Ardrey exemplified the method, their theories “accepted as serious scholarship by a large part of the educated public.” But their claims ­were entirely unfalsifiable—­too well loved, Wilson suspected, to be “mortally threatened” by rigorous testing. The result was a cacophony of ideas. “For this frustrating circumstance, rival expositors have only themselves to blame. When the advocacy method is substituted for strong inference, ‘science’ becomes a wide-­open game in which any number can play.”85 In Sociobiology, Wilson laid down the rules of the “game” of science and excluded t­ hose who broke them. With the ascent of sociobiology to disciplinary authority, Wilson envisioned a new relationship between the sciences and the humanities. For the aggressionists, especially Ardrey, lit­er­a­ture and drama possessed the highest and truest knowledge of h ­ uman nature, which the sciences ­were gradually approaching. Wilson flipped this hierarchy to assert the premier position of science. The humanities and social sciences must now be subordinated to sociobiology, which provided the only means of understanding the h ­ uman mind and its products, including the arts, lit­er­a­ ture, and philosophy. “It may not be too much to say,” Wilson predicted, “that sociology and the other social sciences, as well as the humanities, are the last branches of biology waiting to be included in the Modern Synthesis.”86 Though Wilson left the question open “­whether the social sciences can r­ eally be biologicized in this fashion,” he began Sociobiology by d ­ oing just that: taking a question in ethical philosophy—­suicide—­and reformulating it in terms of evolutionary biology. Wilson criticized Albert Camus and other biology-­innocent phi­los­o­phers for merely “intuit[ing]” standards of good and evil. From an evolutionary perspective, the real question was how the ­human brain evolved so as to ­counter the impulse ­toward self-­annihilation with feelings of guilt and altruism. The answers lay in the intricacies of ge­ne­tics and natu­ral se­lection, not in the overheated imaginations of phi­los­op ­ hers and playwrights. Taking the stance of an unabashed disciplinary imperialist, Wilson declared, “In this macroscopic view the humanities and social sciences shrink to specialized branches of biology; history, biography, and fiction are the research 211

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­ rotocols of h p ­ uman ethology; and anthropology and sociology together constitute the sociobiology of a single primate species.”87 The two-­cultures rift would be healed as all the disciplines became subsumed u ­ nder evolutionary biology. Sociobiology would reconstruct the history of h ­ uman brain machinery and identify the adaptive significance of each of its functions, grounding philosophy in scientific fact. Sociobiology argued that the same broad categories of social be­ hav­ior could be applied cross-­species and that the same biological princi­ ples could explain parental relationships, communication, and dominance in colonial invertebrates, insects, primates—­and now ­humans. Wilson prepared his readers for his final chapter, on ­human society, by engaging in frequent animal / ­human analogies throughout the book. In the chapter on “roles and castes,” he argued that although h ­ uman social roles w ­ ere unique, this was no reason to exclude them from comparisons to ­those of animals.88 His chapter on aggression contained a section on h ­ uman aggression, and his discussion of the sex ratio of offspring asserted that “in rats, sheep, and ­human beings,” large, healthy males mate more often and more successfully than smaller weaker ones.89 By the time readers reached chapter 27, they w ­ ere already accustomed to thinking of h ­ umans as just another animal species to be readily located at one end of the tabular displays of behavioral variability featured in each chapter. He advanced the argument further by applying value-­laden terms to animals, from “despotism” in the iguanid lizard, to “rampant ma­ chismo” in male rhinoceros beetles, to “slavery” in ants, to “xenophobia” in chickens and rhesus macaques.90 As in his popu­lar articles, ­these terms sat in uneasy tension with his continued insistence that sociobiology was resolutely amoral. Wilson denied that his language carried any normative import: just ­because t­ hese be­hav­iors could supposedly be found in animals did not mean that they ­were good or right or should provide a model for ­human be­hav­ior. Unlike pop ethology, sociobiology neither sought nor found moral meaning in nature. For Lorenz, the suite of stable, inbuilt instincts that h ­ umans inherited from their animal ancestors provided a road map for ­human be­hav­ior: its features had to be uncovered and acknowledged and h ­ uman be­hav­ior brought into line with them. For Wilson, on the other hand, since each species was adapted to the requirements of its own par­tic­u­lar niche, it was neither sensible nor pos­si­ble for man to try to emulate the animals. Adaptationism led Wilson to take a much more fluid and dynamic view of h ­ uman nature than Lorenz did. Since evolution was ongoing and 212

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continuous, what ­human nature was now was not what it had been in the Pleistocene, and it could change again as the environment changed. The pattern of evolutionary history provided no guidance on the good life: “It is pos­si­ble to be unhappy and very adaptive,” he had said in his “Man and Beast” paper, and he repeated the formulation in the chapter on aggression in Sociobiology.91 While the Lorenzians pictured a Stone Age h ­ uman nature incongruously trapped in a high-­tech world, Wilson’s image of humanity, at this stage of his sociobiological reasoning, was one of flux.

Defining the H ­ uman Biogram Despite ­these strongly worded divergences, by the end of Sociobiology Wilson had come one step closer to the pop ethologists than he had in any of his e­ arlier works. Instead of exclusively stressing h ­ uman behavioral variability, he shifted his emphasis to underscore the limits of that variability: the under­lying commonality now took the spotlight. In chapter 27 Wilson asserted the existence of a species-­typical, genet­ically based suite of social be­hav­iors that all ­humans manifested by virtue of being ­human. Perhaps fearing that too much emphasis on variability and adaptation could be mistaken for environmentalism, Wilson began to reify h ­ uman nature in a way reminiscent of the aggressionists. In the “Man and Beast” paper and in The Insect Socie­ties, Wilson had considered the ge­ne­tic makeup of animal species to be ever-­changing as changing environmental pressures called forth and favored dif­fer­ent behavioral responses. ­Human be­hav­ior was no exception to the general princi­ple: “Man makes himself genet­ically as he goes along,” Wilson had said in 1969.92 This emphasis on variability and adaptation to a changing environment was a principal criterion by which sociobiology distinguished itself from ethology. As the explanatory universe of sociobiology expanded to include and analyze h ­ uman be­hav­ior more explic­itly, however, Wilson ended Sociobiology by asserting the existence of an unchanging ­human essence. He even borrowed the pop ethologists’ term for it: the “­human biogram.”93 Wilson called for a discipline of anthropological ge­ne­tics that would characterize the h ­ uman biogram, just as zoologists identified the ethograms (the “typical behavioral repertoires”) of other animal species. By comparing ­human be­hav­ior to that of other primate species, sociobiologists could reveal “the basic primate traits that [lay] beneath the surface.” Despite ­human cultural diversity, Wilson argued, h ­ umans shared an 213

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under­lying, innate biogram. “It is the task of comparative sociobiology to trace . . . ​­human qualities as closely as pos­si­ble back through time. . . . ​The exercise ­will help us to identify the be­hav­iors and rules by which individual ­human beings increase their Darwinian fitness through the manipulation of society.”94 He credited the Lorenzians with calling attention to “man’s status as a biological species” and for “breaking the stifling grip of the extreme behaviorists.”95 The ethologists’ downfall had been in reviewing only a “small sample” of animal species—­a defect that Wilson had now remedied with his exhaustive cata­log of animal socie­ties. Wilson employed a number of strategies to reconstruct the ­human biogram. He sought out cross-­cultural universals: the nuclear ­family, for example, and its division of l­ abor. “During the day the ­women and c­ hildren remain in the residential area while the men forage for game or its symbolic equivalent in the form of barter and money. The males cooperate in bands to hunt or deal with neighboring groups”—­a pattern supposedly repeated the world over and from time immemorial. Wilson assumed that ­these universals had a ge­ne­tic basis; male homo­sexuality, for example, “exhibited in comparably high fractions of the male populations” in many cultures, prob­ably depended on a “ge­ne­tic predisposition.” Fi­nally, he reasoned backward to deduce how the be­hav­ior might have helped its possessor to increase the frequency of his genes in the next generation, at least ­under the conditions of the ancestral environment. Homo­sexuality might have evolved by reciprocal altruism; homosexual men who had no ­children of their own might have helped to raise their ­sisters’ offspring, who shared their genes.96 The h ­ uman tendency to uncritically accept systems of belief—­human “indoctrinability,” for Wilson, a cultural universal evident in such be­hav­iors as religious ritual—­might have arisen by group se­lection, by which “conformer genes” could spread in a population over time by enhancing social cohesion.97 Warfare, a “nearly universal” feature of chiefdoms and states, had persisted ­because it served the principal purpose of spreading a group’s genes. Warfare in turn gave rise as its “ge­ne­tic product” to man’s noblest traits: “team play, altruism, patriotism, bravery on the field of ­battle.”98 For ­every feature of the biogram, an adaptive reason for its existence (what Wilson’s critics would ­later call a “just so story”) had to be deduced. Having delineated the h ­ uman biogram, Wilson then faced the is / ­ought question. If the biogram described how ­humans behaved, did it also prescribe how ­humans must behave? Was ­human be­hav­ior controlled and ­limited by the biogram? While Lorenz had answered this question 214

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with a ringing affirmative, Wilson was more circumspect. On the one hand, he argued that a “genet­ically accurate code of ethics”—­one based in knowledge of neurobiology and sociobiology—­would be “completely fair.” Ethics must be “removed temporarily from the hands of the phi­los­ o­phers and biologicized.” On the other hand, he portrayed the biogram as incompletely understood and as changeable: “The ge­ne­tic foundation on which any such normative system is built can be expected to shift continuously. Mankind has never s­ topped evolving,” he wrote, echoing his stance in the “Man and Beast” paper.99 If t­ here w ­ ere limits ­here, Wilson seemed unwilling to say exactly what they w ­ ere. While Lorenz had found an incontrovertible roadmap in a species’ instinctual repertoire, Wilson confirmed the existence of the biogram but not its stability. To propose a uniform code of ethics on the basis of such a multifaceted and protean entity was impossible. But Wilson’s reification of h ­ uman nature in the final chapter of So­ ciobiology proved to be only an intermediate step. In On ­Human Nature (1978), Wilson’s position shifted yet again, from reification to a fully normative stance. In this last installment of his sociobiology trilogy, Wilson not only proclaimed the existence of a common h ­ uman nature, he also asserted its role as guide for ­human be­hav­ior. By fi­nally stepping over the line from is to ­ought, Wilson came into even closer alignment with the pop ethologists.

Ardrey and Wilson in Harmony By the mid-1970s, Wilson had a strategic reason for aligning himself with his pre­de­ces­sors in popularizing the sciences of ­human nature. The publication of Sociobiology in 1975 had embroiled him almost immediately in a debate over the po­liti­cal implications of his science—­a debate strikingly similar to the one that had enveloped the pop ethologists. His critics—­a group of left-­wing biologists including Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and Ruth Hubbard—­alleged that asserting a biological basis for ­human nature was nothing but “biological determinism”: “a ge­ne­tic defense of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex.”100 The charge stung Wilson, and he forcefully tried to rebut it. In this context, Wilson sought allies, and one of the first to rush to his side was Robert Ardrey. As sociobiology came ­under attack, Wilson’s stance ­toward pop ethology, and t­ oward Ardrey, changed accordingly. Condemnation turned to praise. 215

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Wilson’s treatment of Ardrey’s 1976 book, The Hunting Hypothesis, provides evidence of the change. Wilson read the book in manuscript, provided Ardrey extensive comments, and Ardrey revised it in response.101 Wilson then wrote a highly positive review of the book in The Saturday Review, praising Ardrey for being “deferential to scientists, quick to acknowledge and correct e­ arlier m ­ istakes,” for taking a “more cautious and professional tone” than in his ­earlier books, and for “learning to walk carefully around his academic critics.”102 Wilson characterized Ardrey as neither an “aspiring academic scientist” nor a right-­wing apologist for the status quo (­after all, the sociobiologist asserted, perhaps with his own critics in mind, “no solid connections can be made between po­liti­cal ideology and personal conceptions of h ­ uman nature”). Rather, he called the pop ethologist “the lyric poet of h ­ uman evolution, a superb writer with a special vision who has done far more than any other to capture the Homeric quality of his subject.” A poet—­not a scientist: Wilson’s choice of words was telling. Still, Wilson argued that scientists had something to learn from Ardrey, whom he called “the only popu­lar science writer who can send chills down this reviewer’s spine”: “Most scientists in this field sense the grandeur of the history they are reconstructing, but few can put it into words. . . . ​The best scientists might profitably form a symbiosis with first-­class writers such as Ardrey who can . . . ​translate subjects into precise but affecting personal visions with an artistry beyond the scientist’s reach.” Prefiguring his exhortations to scientists at the end of On ­Human Nature, and providing a blueprint for his own writerly activity, Wilson remarked, “Thus might the two cultures join.”103 Ardrey was thrilled by Wilson’s endorsement. “SOME REVIEW,” he wrote to the sociobiologist. “What I enjoy most, of course, is your literary praise. But in larger terms I appreciate deeply the clarity of your placing my writing in proper perspective.” Wilson had realized, Ardrey believed, the significance of an artist’s interpretation of evolution: “I recognize that since no one has written the way I do, categories become difficult to find. What you have done so successfully is to create the category, and demonstrate its function and its value.”104 The two men shared a perception that they w ­ ere both writers, which they regarded as a rarity in the scientific world. Wilson defined “the core of our common interest” by quoting the evolutionist J.  B.  S. Haldane: “I am absolutely convinced that science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than are the classics, but the products of this stimulus do not normally see the light b ­ ecause scientific men as a class are devoid of any perception of literary form.”105 216

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In the course of their correspondence, common interest merged into sympathy, friendship, and mutual support. Their previous dispute seemingly forgotten, Wilson and Ardrey commiserated about their enemies, which, notably, both regarded as the same enemies. Despite all of Wilson’s efforts to put distance between himself and pop ethology, Ardrey saw the sociobiology debate as a continuation of the aggression debate, and his own antagonists as now turning their fire on Wilson. “Let’s call it the Wilson-­Ardrey Theory of Living Targets,” Ardrey wrote to Wilson. “I am a small, elusive target and they kept shooting and missing ­until they gave up and said the hell with it. But in the meantime r­ ose up a large, imposing, nailed-­down academically target named Wilson, and they all said, Hey, let’s get this one! You c­ an’t miss!” But miss was exactly what the critics did: “In their excitement, like at the opening of the deer season, they all went out and shot each other.”106 If The Hunting Hypothesis had gotten less attention than Sociobiology, it was all in ser­vice of the larger cause; Ardrey may have lost that par­tic­ul­ar ­battle, but together Ardrey and Wilson would win the war. Wilson agreed with Ardrey’s depiction of one long debate. “Yes, Sociobiology drew fire off of The Hunting Hypothesis,” Wilson admitted, but this was to the ultimate benefit of their common proj­ect, since it resulted in “a full daylight exposure of what Robin Fox once justly called the w ­ hole vampire crew. . . . ​Previously they could respond to you, Morris, or Lorenz as scientists dismissing pop­u­lar­izers. With Sociobiology they could not,” he declared. Wilson was convinced that his own book had helped Ardrey: “One of the side benefits that should hearten you is that it is no longer fash­ion­able for regular biologists to attack Ardrey when the subject of aggression and ­human evolution comes up. Previously this was required in order to show that one is rigorous and furthermore, and much more importantly, that one is socially progressive and against sexism. Now they ­don’t know what to think, and at least have to admit that you are a superb writer. Your subject has been institutionalized.”107 Ardrey for his part was only too happy to provide support to his embattled younger colleague: “You could use another hand to hold.”108 Wilson assured his friend that their joint proj­ect was in the ascendance: “Radicalism is declining in U.S. science, and the tide is turning decisively in f­ avor of sociobiology and ­human behavioral evolution. The intellectual argument has now been carried into the heart of the social sciences.” Wilson’s last letter to Ardrey credited the pop ethologist for having broken the path for his own work: “We are proud of you for having ridden point.”109 ­There could 217

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be no stronger statement of harmony between sociobiology and its pre­ de­ces­sor science.

Embracing the Normative Wilson consolidated his ties to pop ethology in On ­Human Nature. Much slimmer and admittedly more speculative than the 1971 and 1975 volumes, the book brought h ­ uman social be­hav­ior fully into the realm of evolutionary biology.110 It also took a much stronger normative stance than ­either of the previous two volumes. Expanding on Sociobiology’s chapter  27, Wilson chose four “elemental categories” of be­hav­ior—­each an aspect of the ­human biogram: aggression; sex; altruism; and religion. Each was presented as a cultural universal, and each as the product of ge­ne­tic evolution by natu­ral se­ lection. Since, in ­human beings, the individual was usually the unit of se­lection (unlike in insects), ­these be­hav­iors must have persisted in the repertoire ­because of the advantage they conferred on individuals, especially in the ancestral environment. For each be­hav­ior, Wilson identified its basic form—­presumably determined by the genes—­and its variations, presumably traceable to cultural influence. The sameness, the universality of the be­hav­iors, indicated their “under­lying” biological basis, while the differences among them represented the inessential trappings of ­cultural overlay. Wilson in­ven­ted a term—­“hypertrophy”—to refer to the “cultural inflation of innate h ­ uman properties,” the cultural diversification of the basic ­human plan.111 In making this move, Wilson took a step beyond his position in chapter 27 of Sociobiology. ­There he had reified the h ­ uman biogram but still allowed it to change over time in response to evolutionary pressures. Now, in On ­Human Nature, Wilson asserted the innate stability and permanence of the ­human behavioral repertoire. At the outset of the chapter on aggression, for instance, Wilson posed the aggressionists’ question—­ “Are ­human beings innately aggressive?”—­and gave it the aggressionists’ answer—­“yes”—­a clear overture to the aggressionists’ audience.112 While denying a unitary aggression instinct, Wilson affirmed that h ­ uman beings ­were “strongly disposed to respond with unreasoning hatred to external threats.” Stone axes and spears ­were no longer the way to ­settle disputes, but “to acknowledge the obsolescence of the rules is not to banish them.”113 ­Humans spent 99 ­percent of their history as hunter-­gatherers, and the be­hav­iors evolved during that period formed a “deep structure” 218

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that constrained the amount and degree of cultural variation pos­si­ble.114 The “divergence” between culture and genet­ically endowed ­human nature “cannot become too g­ reat,” Wilson cautioned, b ­ ecause natu­ral se­ lection would act as a kind of corrective to any “unadaptive” be­hav­ior. “Socie­ties that decline b ­ ecause of a ge­ne­tic propensity of its [sic] members to generate competitively weaker cultures w ­ ill be replaced by t­ hose more appropriately endowed.”115 Cultures that strayed too far from the species norm would eventually be yanked back into line. According to this new view, the biogram did not simply exist as the product of past evolution; it exerted a constraining power over f­ uture ­human evolution. “­There is a limit,” Wilson warned, “perhaps closer to the practices of con­temporary ­human socie­ties than we have had the wit to grasp, beyond which biological evolution ­will begin to pull cultural evolution back to itself.”116 ­Human nature was now not simply the rec­ord of the ­human past, stored in the ge­ne­tic repository within each one of us; it also determined the direction of the ­human f­ uture. The “rules” of our nature ­were not obsolete vestiges to be ignored or shoved aside.117 Short of eugenics (a possibility with which Wilson toyed at the end of the book), ­these rules ­were ineradicable biological princi­ples that had to be obeyed “faithfully.”118 The “biological formula of territorialism,” for example, “translate[d] easily into the rituals of modern property owner­ship”119— an almost word-­for-­word reiteration of Ardrey’s argument in Territorial Imperative. Another rule held that males ­were aggressive, fickle, and undiscriminating in choosing sexual partners, while females w ­ ere coy, a behavioral standard as true for ­humans as for other animals.120 On the basis of such rules, “The trajectory of history can be plotted ahead, at least roughly. Biological constraints exist that define zones of improbable or forbidden entry.”121 Wilson had stepped over the line from is to ­ought, from the descriptive to the prescriptive, from the reification of h ­ uman nature to the assertion of a biological hard core as a normative standard. Like the Lorenzians, Wilson now also sought a moral guide in nature. “Can the cultural evolution of higher ethical values gain a direction and momentum of its own and completely replace ge­ne­tic evolution?” Wilson asked. “I think not. The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values w ­ ill be constrained in accordance with their effect on the ­human gene pool.”122 Knowledge of our ge­ne­tic propensities would help fashion “a biology of ethics, . . . ​the se­lection of a more deeply understood and enduring code of moral values.”123 To make the point, Wilson quoted 219

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the literary scholar Lionel Trilling: “Somewhere in the mind, ‘­there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason, that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or l­ater it w ­ ill exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it.’ ”124 Given his valuation of science, it is ironic that Wilson chose to clinch the argument by quoting a humanist and not a scientist. The choice indicates a closeness to the pop ethologists—­especially to Ardrey’s esteem for art and lit­er­at­ ure—­missing from Wilson’s ­earlier work. The tone of Wilson’s normative stance was not identical to that of the pop ethologists. The sociobiologist still maintained his accustomed neutrality, while the Lorenzians had applied the lessons of animal and ­human nature directly to the pressing po­liti­cal prob­lems of their day. With an air of resignation, Wilson’s approach said that h ­ ere are the innate limits that ­humans must learn to accept, within which ­humans must learn to live or court extinction. H ­ ere is what h ­ umans by nature are—or cannot help being. He did not declare that the limits supposedly set by nature w ­ ere 125 good—­just unavoidable. We must “work around the rules.” The aggressionists, by contrast, wrote out of the urgency of their own Cold War moment; they embraced the specific po­liti­cal applications of their views, and ­wholeheartedly believed that nature was fully worthy of emulation. Acting in accordance with ­human nature was ultimately the only t­ hing that could save humanity. For Wilson positive solutions to current issues w ­ ere not on the agenda; in fact, he deliberately avoided discussing them. His goal was more detached: to reveal the h ­ uman evolutionary epic as the best and truest myth of our time, a worthy alternative to, if not complete replacement for, traditional religion. He hinted at the moral precepts that could be derived from it—­universal ­human rights might be a “mammalian imperative,” while slavery and Marxism w ­ ere doomed—­but he declined to go further than that, and regarded the full “search for values” as a task for the ­future.126 Some readers, he conceded, might oppose his view as “elitist” in the face of overwhelming social and economic prob­lems.127 But Wilson seemed to believe that the determination of our natu­ral capacities and limits was a more fundamental and profound aim than direct po­ liti­cal engagement. Along with his apo­liti­cal stance, Wilson’s persona as pop­ul­ar­ izer was dif­fer­ent from the aggressionists. The Harvard professor and specialist in entomology presented a striking contrast to Ardrey, the 220

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Hollywood scriptwriter and critic of professional science. Ardrey the artist had placed the humanities above the sciences, depicting the truths of ­human nature that the sciences had recently uncovered as long familiar to poets and playwrights. Wilson, meanwhile—at least, most of the time—­envisioned the sciences as atop the hierarchy of knowledge, and in a position to explain philosophy, lit­er­at­ ure, “artists, artistic genius, and even art.”128 Who was the proper spokesperson for science was very much at stake ­here. While Lorenz had opened the borders of ethology to include amateurs and laymen, Wilson sought to exclude them, instead exhorting the real scientists, the true professionals, to leave their academic redoubts and become public intellectuals. The public arena was filled with humanists, Wilson lamented, who regarded modern science as nothing more than “a prob­lem solving activity and a set of technical marvels . . . ​a barbaric culture still ungraced by a written language.” But scientists now possessed the legitimacy and the authority to take their place in the public sphere, to show how the two cultures divide between the humanities and the sciences must be bridged by the awesome explanatory power of evolutionary biology. “It is true,” Wilson said, “that many ‘humanistic’ scientists step outside scientific materialism to participate in the culture . . . ​but they almost never close the gap between the two worlds of discourse. With rare exceptions they are the tame scientists, the token emissaries . . . ​degraded by the label they accept too readily: pop­u­ lar­izers.”129 When relegated to ­these “token emissaries,” science became too open and too un­regu­la­ted a playing field, a chaotic game without rules. One of the principal objects of Wilson’s sociobiology trilogy was to reassert proper order, to contain the discourse within professional bound­ aries, and to limit who could speak. Wilson maintained ­these differences from the pop ethologists in tone and persona throughout his sociobiological oeuvre. But ­these evident differences should not conceal the points of convergence. Sociobiology and pop ethology shared overarching aims: to bring ­human beings u ­ nder the purview of an all-­embracing biological science of be­hav­ior, and to use that science to guide conduct. Wilson’s normative stance in On ­Human Nature, his conviction that nature was a moral guide that must be heeded, brought him closer to the pop ethologists than he had ever been before. His use of value-­laden language, his appeal to the humanities at certain crucial points of the argument, his public and private alliance with ­Ardrey and other pop ethologists, show that Wilson reached across the divide he had constructed between his own science and that of his 221

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­ re­de­ces­sors. The sociobiology series began with an assertion of stark difp ference from pop ethology. It concluded in a position approaching continuity.

d The aggression debate provided the context in which Wilson’s sociobiology developed, and this context served him well. Pop ethology acted as a foil against which Wilson contrasted his own science of animal be­hav­ior and ­human nature—an approach he touted as much more scientific. Wilson sought to demote Lorenz’s science of instinct in f­ avor of his own evolutionary approach to social be­hav­ior and to step into Lorenz’s place as the key public spokesman for that science. Wilson’s response to pop ethology ­shaped sociobiology in both content and form. At the same time, however, Wilson made a series of incremental steps to bring his own science into alignment with that of his pre­de­ces­sors. As the pop ethologists had done, Wilson envisioned an all-­embracing biological science of be­ hav­ior that conceived of h ­ uman nature as a genet­ically based product of evolution and that served to guide h ­ uman conduct. Wilson capitalized on the existence of the pre­ce­dent science, aiming to capture the same broad popu­lar readership that had eagerly devoured pop ethology. His pre­de­ ces­sors’ popularity made his own bid for similar status pos­si­ble. Fi­nally, when the debate over sociobiology ignited in the fall of 1975, the pop ethologists provided Wilson with a set of ready-­made allies, somewhat battle-­ scarred, but still spoiling for a fight. ­There was only one drawback to an alliance with pop ethology. The debate that engulfed Wilson’s work bore a striking resemblance to the aggression debate. Far from putting that debate to rest, as he had initially hoped to do, the same arguments from the same antagonistic positions rekindled with redoubled energy, this time with a new popu­lar exponent at their center. Wilson always claimed to have been surprised by the vehement po­liti­cal tenor of the sociobiology debate. But given the context from which he emerged, and the connections that he cultivated, he prob­ ably ­shouldn’t have been.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Genes and Gender The Sociobiology Debate In practically ­every generation, ­there arise new prophets of “biology as destiny,” and each is feted as a new Galileo who must be protected against po­liti­cal persecution—­this time from enraged ­women rather than from the church. —­Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifin, and Barbara Fried, ­ Women Look at Biology Looking at ­Women

I

t is the most notorious incident in the history of the sociobiology debate, perhaps one of the most famous, or infamous, in the entire history of biology. The February 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC, featured a symposium on sociobiology with twenty speakers spread over two days. Most of the speakers gave noncontroversial science talks on animal be­ hav­ior, but a few spoke about ­human be­hav­ior and a few o ­ thers presented criticisms of sociobiology. The sessions w ­ ere proceeding uneventfully ­until the man at the center of the controversy, E. O. Wilson, came to deliver his talk on Wednesday after­noon, February 15.1 For the preceding three years, since its appearance in 1975, Wilson’s book Sociobiology had been the target of fierce debate. His chief critics ­were members of the Sociobiology Study Group (SSG), a collection of left-­leaning Boston-­area scientists, science teachers, and students, affiliated with Science for the P ­ eople, a nationwide organ­ization founded in 1969 known for its antiwar, anti–­nuclear technology, environmentalist, pro-­labor, and Marxist stances.2 Starting with a critical letter in the New York Review of Books in November 1975 signed by sixteen of its members, the SSG had attacked Wilson’s claims for a ge­ne­tic basis for ­human be­hav­ior as racist, sexist, and supportive of the status quo. 223

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Wilson had in turn responded angrily and defensively. The debate raged in the popu­lar media, in popu­lar science journals, and in the pages of Sci­ ence for the ­People magazine.3 By February  1978, as Wilson was anticipating the release of his On ­Human Nature ­later that year, tensions ­were ­running high.4 Speakers at the AAAS symposium included both advocates and critics of sociobiology: David Barash, author of a popu­lar textbook on sociobiology; Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist and SSG member; and the anthropologist Eleanor Leacock. When it was Wilson’s turn to speak, suddenly, about a dozen ­people rushed up from the audience to the speakers’ platform. Shouting and chanting, “Racist Wilson, you ­can’t hide! We charge you with genocide,” some of them took over the microphone to denounce sociobiology, while ­others seized a pitcher of ice ­water and poured it over Wilson’s head. “Wilson,” they cried, “­you’re all wet!” The protestors—­members of a Harvard-­Radcliffe student group calling itself the International Committee Against Racism, or INCAR—­then retreated. ­After some moments of confusion, order was restored when the session moderator apologized to Wilson for the unseemly interruption, while Wilson received a standing ovation. Both Gould and his fellow SSG member Jonathan Beckwith stood up to dissociate the SSG from the protestors’ action and to apologize to Wilson, and they, too, got an ovation. Then, fi­nally, Wilson gave his talk.5 Characteristically, both sides of the debate claimed the episode as a victory. Wilson interpreted the apologies and the dramatic split between the SSG and INCAR as a sign of the opposition’s disarray (though both groups in fact agreed on sociobiology’s racism).6 Meanwhile, despite the distraction of INCAR’s guerilla tactics, the SSG believed that its own members had “put in a good showing and influenced a lot of p ­ eople.”7 The accounts, however divergent, reinforced a shared impression: that sociobiology’s main critics ­were the prominent men of the SSG, especially Gould, Beckwith, and Richard C. Lewontin, and that the main criticism that sociobiology faced was its purported racism.8 But ­these accounts w ­ ere crucially incomplete. Both failed to mention that at the very same 1978 AAAS convention at which the water-­dousing episode took place, another symposium convened whose speakers also criticized Wilson and sociobiology. This one, however, did not center mainly on racism and was not ­under the auspices of the SSG. It was the brainchild of an entirely in­de­pen­dent organ­ization—­the Genes and Gender Collective (GGC), a group of feminist w ­ omen scientists—­and 224

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their talks emphasized what its members saw as sociobiology’s most abiding weakness: its sexism.9 The feminist scientists shifted the priorities of the SSG’s critique. The Sociobiology Study Group focused on what it called the “biological determinism” of sociobiology, with pro–­status quo classism, racism, and sexism (usually in that order) as subsets of the overarching category. The Genes and Gender Collective, by contrast, took sexism as the paramount charge, not as subsidiary to some broader category. Sociobiology’s sexism was (to the feminists) explicit and undeniable; its gender essentialism—­its insistence that men’s and ­women’s typical be­hav­iors stemmed directly from their dif­fer­ent biology—­was its principal flaw. Explaining why essentialism was wrong, the GGC argued that b ­ ecause genes and environment interacted at ­every level, ­there could be no direct link between genes and be­hav­ior. The feminists also took a social constructivist approach to science that repudiated the myth that science was neutral and that challenged Wilson’s positivism—­a tack dif­fer­ent from any that the SSG took. Not only in its critique, but also by the very fact of its existence, the Genes and Gender Collective represented something new in the debates over the popu­lar science of h ­ uman nature: an or­ga­nized feminist presence. The advent of the feminist collective shows that Wilson actually faced two groups of critics—­not just one, the Sociobiology Study Group— and two distinct and dif­fer­ent lines of criticism from each. In the course of the sociobiology debate, however, both Wilson and the SSG marginalized the feminist critique. Wilson never responded as publicly to the charge of sexism as he did to the SSG’s charge of racism, which he vociferously and hotly denied. Meanwhile the feminists believed that—­although the SSG criticized sociobiology’s sexism—­the group gave the critique only token acknowledgement and treated it as secondary to sociobiology’s worse sin of racism. The Harvard biologist Ruth Hubbard felt the marginalization so acutely that although she was one of the original signatories on the SSG’s 1975 letter against sociobiology, she broke from the male critics and or­ga­nized the second meeting of the Genes and Gender Collective—­the meeting that took place at the 1978 AAAS convention.10 As a result of this double marginalization, the GGC did not have the impact on the sociobiology debate that it might have, had its critique been accorded a more central role. The promise that the feminists offered to shift the debate into a new register was not fulfilled. Instead, the sociobiology debate tended to take the form of its pre­de­ces­sor, the aggression 225

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debate—an oppositional standoff pitting nature against nurture, conservatives against liberals, “social Darwinists,” racists, and apologists for the status quo against “radical environmentalists.” The feminist alternative showed that this was not the only pos­si­ble pattern that public debates about ­human nature could follow. But that was the pattern into which the sociobiology debate had settled when the feminists made their intervention.

Sociobiology as the New Pop Ethology The aggression debate, 1966–1976, carved out certain polarized positions in the discourse about ­human nature. As each side cast the other as “extreme,” that debate created a power­ful rhetorical template that succeeding debates about h ­ uman nature found hard to escape. The debate over Wilson’s Sociobiology followed suit: even before the book’s ­actual appearance, the two sides (and of course ­there could be only two) took up their accustomed strongholds. Once the book was published, t­hese oppositions hardened further. Despite the fact that Wilson made strenuous attempts in Sociobi­ ology to put distance between himself and the aggressionists and to distinguish their science from his, readers regularly conflated sociobiology with pop ethology. The New York Times announcement of Wilson’s book a month before its publication in June 1975 emphasized the continuity by noting that “much of the raw data has come from ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen.”11 Once the book was published, the Baltimore Sun erased Wilson’s carefully constructed distinctions between himself and his pre­de­ces­sors: “Sociobiology got a bad name among humanists early on ­because of such books as ‘The Naked Ape’ and such phrases as ‘the territorial imperative.’ ” But “lately,” the article continued, sociobiology had emphasized altruism and cooperation as much as aggression.12 The Boston Globe began its positive review by mentioning Ardrey, Lorenz, and Morris, and observed that “Wilson’s book attempts to relate a world of oddly dif­fer­ent—­yet strangely similar—­facts and findings on diverse animal populations.”13 Even Conrad H. Waddington’s largely positive review in the New York Review of Books—­the article that triggered the sociobiology debate—­ began by acknowledging the Nobel Prize–­winning work of von Frisch, Tinbergen, and Lorenz, before noting that “the most sustained attempt to synthesize the ­whole of our present­day knowledge is undoubtedly that of Professor Edward  O. Wilson of 226

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Harvard.”14 Sociobiology was evidently recognized as treading a path already well worn by the proponents of ethology. The connection having been secured by t­ hese early endorsements, Wilson’s critics picked up on it at once, reading sociobiology through the lens of the aggression debate as just another installment of pop ethology. In a letter published in November 1975 in response to Waddington’s review, the Sociobiology Study Group asserted the existence of an unbroken line “from Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest,’ to Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, and now E. O. Wilson.”15 Just as Montagu and his allies had charged their opponents with a reactionary po­ liti­cal agenda, so Wilson’s critics now classed sociobiology with social Darwinism, eugenics, and the racist claims of Arthur Jensen and William Shockley, both of whom had asserted highly controversial links between race and IQ.16 The SSG, however, gave this cata­log of infamy a new name: biological determinism. “Wilson joins the long parade of biological determinists,” the letter concluded, “whose work has served to buttress the institutions of their society by exonerating them from responsibility for social prob­lems.”17 In making this identification, the SSG ceded any claim of its own to recapturing the concept and putting “biological determinism” to its own uses. The concept of a biologically based ­human nature became the province solely of ­those assumed to be racists and conservatives. Despite protesting that he abhorred the limelight, Wilson proved himself an a­ dept combatant, matching his critics’ moves blow for blow. He responded to the letter of Allen and colleagues with a letter of his own in the next issue of the New York Review of Books.18 Wilson denied that he had ever tried to draw moral, ethical, or po­liti­cal lessons from nature, quoting his own articles in Scientific American and the New York Times Magazine for support. He took special umbrage at the asserted link between sociobiology and eugenics and argued that only purposeful misreading and distortion could represent him as an “arch hereditarian” and “biological determinist.” Wilson stressed that some of the critics had actually been his friends and that “two share the same building with me at Harvard University.” Had he known of the critics’ letter before it was published, he would have tried to ­settle their differences in private. But collegial courtesy and personal decorum had been shattered, the bound­aries breached. Like the aggression debate, the sociobiology debate was to be no gentlemanly disagreement conducted amicably within the walls of the acad­emy. Wilson’s response ended by shifting the fulcrum of the debate in a way that would become characteristic, from parsing and disputing the 227

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meanings of sociobiology to an issue of freedom of inquiry. Just as Philip Wylie had claimed that the “Liberal Intellectual Establishment” legislated what could and could not be said in science, Wilson asserted that the “self righ­teous vigilantism” of his critics “diminishes the spirit of ­free inquiry and discussion crucial to the health of the intellectual community.”19 Ironically, the more Wilson tried to contain the debate—­absolving himself of po­liti­cal intent and decrying the media as no place for a scientific discussion—­the more he had to enter the public arena to do so. The debate was further inflamed by the International Committee Against Racism, the group of Harvard and Radcliffe students who would a few years l­ ater go a­ fter Wilson with the pitcher of ice ­water. The group interrupted his lectures and talks at Harvard in December of 1975 and called his theories “racist and dangerous.”20 Wilson seemed especially sensitive to and deeply offended by the charge and appeared anxious to rebut it forcefully and publicly. ­There was “absolutely no racism” in his book, he said in defending himself against INCAR’s criticism. “To call chapter 27 of my book racist is slander.” He appealed to the assumed liberalism of the institution to which he—­and some of his critics—­belonged: “Hunting for a racist in the Harvard faculty,” Wilson assured his audience, “is like looking for an atheist in a Benedictine monastery.”21 ­There was no doubt, however, that the accusation stung. In March 1976 the Sociobiology Study Group launched their next broadside against sociobiology. As part of a “dialogue” forum in the journal BioScience, the group again called Wilson’s book “another biological determinism” and stressed its notorious lineage. “The simplistic forms of the h ­ uman nature argument given by Lorenz, Ardrey, Tiger, and Fox . . . ​have no scientific credit and have been scorned as works of ‘advocacy’ by E. O. Wilson, whose own book . . . ​is the manifesto of a new, more complex version of biological determinism, no less a work of ‘advocacy’ than its rejected pre­de­ces­sors.”22 In case anyone needed reminding about where such works could lead, the article mentioned Lorenz’s “call in 1940 in Germany for ‘the extermination of ele­ments of the population loaded with dregs,’ based upon his ethological theories.”23 The critique took aim at Wilson’s ethnocentric definitions of supposedly universal traits and be­hav­iors; his facile analogies between animal and h ­ uman ­be­hav­ior; his fallacious assumption that single genes determine par­tic­ u­lar be­hav­iors; and his invention of “just so stories” in which the perfect adaptation of traits and be­hav­iors accounts for their per­sis­tence in evolution. 228

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Wilson’s reply charged the critics with “academic vigilantism”: the liberal establishment had appointed itself the arbiter of truth, intimidating and harassing ­those with whom it disagreed and making f­ree and open inquiry impossible. “In the Boston area at the pre­sent time it has become difficult to conduct an open forum” on sociobiology, Wilson declaimed, “without falling into the role of prosecutor or defendant.”24 Adopting the strategy of the pop ethologists, Wilson repeatedly characterized his opponents as “extreme environmentalists” who insisted that ­human be­hav­ior was “infinitely malleable,” tarring them with the brush of B. F. Skinner, “a radical environmentalist whose conclusions about ­human be­hav­ior are essentially indistinguishable from the Science for the P ­ eople Group.”25 Wilson even redeployed the same argument against his opponents that Ardrey had used against his: that h ­ uman nature provided the basis for ­human rights, standing as a bulwark against totalitarian attempts at h ­ uman engineering. “If culture is all that created h ­ uman rights, as the extreme environmentalist position holds,” Wilson asserted, “then culture can equally well validate their removal.”26 Biologically based ­human nature was the only defense that could truly protect the ­people against “manipulation by the power­ful.”27 The argument kept open the possibility that the concept of ­human nature could support other outcomes than racism; it could stand for freedom and individual rights, just as it had for Ardrey. Wilson also engaged his critics on their own turf, in the pages of ­Science for the ­People magazine. In March  1976 the Sociobiology Study Group presented excerpts of its previously published critiques, as usual tying Wilson to a long line of “determinist” writers, including “Ardrey, Lorenz, Tiger, and Fox,” whose works supported the status quo.28 Wilson responded in a letter published in the May 1976 issue. Still smarting from INCAR’s critique the previous December, he denied that Sociobiology was at all connected to Shockley or Jensen: “Racism is not the issue,” he declared.”29 The real issue, Wilson asserted, was “ge­ne­tic determinism,” ­whether t­ here ­were built-in constraints on ­human be­hav­ior, which he argued ­there ­were. But such an argument was in no way po­liti­cally conservative, as the critics claimed; on the contrary, it was the critics’ view, their “radical environmentalism,” that supported the status quo by paving the way for dictators to seize control. In a brief three-­paragraph letter, Wilson had managed to characterize his opponents as “radical environmentalists” and “radical leftists” three times. In their rebuttal to Wilson’s letter, in the same May 1976 issue, the SSG tried hard once and for all to shake the “environmentalist” label and 229

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sought to stake out a m ­ iddle ground: a theory of h ­ uman nature, the group said, could not “possibly be based scientifically on ­either a ge­ne­tic or environmentalist hypothesis.”30 Stephen Jay Gould took par­tic­u­lar pains to rebut the sociobiologists’ favorite epithet, declaring that “my criticism of Wilson does not invoke a non-­biological ‘environmentalism’; it merely pits the concept of biological potentiality—­a brain capable of the full range of ­human be­hav­iors and rigidly predisposed ­toward none—­against the idea of biological determinism—­specific genes for specific behavioral traits.”31 Nature versus nurture, racists versus radical environmentalists, a liberal po­liti­cal agenda swamping f­ree speech and scientific inquiry, ­human nature as freedom’s bulwark: one could be forgiven for experiencing a sense of déjà vu. As the New York Times headline put it: “The Politics in a Debate over Sociobiology: The Basic Ele­ments of the Argument Are Not New.” Rensberger’s article portrayed the sociobiology controversy as “an updated version of the old nature-­nurture debate,” beginning with Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism in the nineteenth ­century and continuing with Ardrey’s and Morris’s claims that the roots of ­human be­hav­ior lay in instinct. “Now,” Rensberger wrote, “­there is sociobiology.”32

­Women, Sexism, and Science for the P ­ eople In one impor­tant way, however, the Sociobiology Study Group’s critique of sociobiology departed from the accustomed pattern laid down by the aggression debate. While pop ethology’s critics had taken aim mainly at the alleged racism of Lorenz and Ardrey, the critics of sociobiology broadened their critique to include also the charge of sexism. For Montagu, the aggressionists’ sexism had hardly been a concern—­though it had been for their feminist critics. The SSG made space for feminist criticism in a way that would have been unthinkable and unimaginable for Montagu. For the SSG, not only the racism and classism of sociobiology w ­ ere objectionable; its obvious and thoroughgoing sexism was as well. The place of the sexism charge in the SSG’s critique reflected a longer tradition in Science for the ­People. Its magazine provided a reliable outlet for feminist criticism of biological theories of h ­ uman nature even before the appearance of Sociobiology. The biologist Rita Arditti, for example, had used the magazine’s pages to take specific aim at the sexism of pop ethology.33 In her 1973 critique of pop ethology, published in Science for the ­People, Arditti quoted the anthropologist Lila Lei230

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bowitz to dispatch Desmond Morris, called Lionel Tiger “pernicious,” and criticized “androcentric” biases in scientific research on hormones and contraception. Arditti compared sexism with racism in their demonization of the “Other”: “Blacks have ‘rhythm,’ w ­ omen have ‘intuition,’ and they are both ill fitted to interact efficiently in modern technological society. They are, as we know, ‘dif­fer­ent.’ ”34 Arditti set out the components of a feminist philosophy of science: recognition that scientific neutrality was a myth and that science was monopolized by white men, and re­ orientation around the health prob­lems of paramount concern to w ­ omen. “Love and identification with the object of study” would replace objectification and exploitative and “value-­free” technology. The oppression of ­women, Arditti affirmed, was “not the result of biology but of the social constructs around it.”35 Once Wilson’s Sociobiology was published, the purported sexism of his claims became a natu­ral target for the Sociobiology Study Group’s criticism. In addition to tying Wilson to Shockley and Jensen and to the legacy of social Darwinism, the SSG attacked the sociobiologists’ claim for the biological basis of sex roles in society. Wilson, the critics argued, explained that sex differences in be­hav­ior existed b ­ ecause they ­were natu­ral. In justifying discrimination, such a claim contained “an obvious po­liti­cal message.” The SSG used Wilson’s purported sexism as a perfect exemplar of its conviction that “­there is politics aplenty in Sociobiology and ­those of us who are its critics did not put it t­ here.”36 In the pages of Science for the ­People magazine, the SSG pointed to popularizations of sociobiology that trafficked in ste­reo­types of passive females and indiscriminate, aggressive males—­images that took “as given the sexist socio-­political status quo.” The charge of sexism was central to the magazine’s critiques of the sociobiological high school curriculum, “Exploring ­Human Nature,” developed by Robert Trivers and Irven DeVore, and the popu­lar 1976 film Sociobiology: D ­ oing What Comes Naturally, which featured DeVore, Trivers, and Wilson.37 The sociologist Barbara Chasin excoriated Wilson’s “sexist synthesis” for selecting data from hormone biology, primatology, and cultural anthropology so as to support a preconceived notion of female inferiority.38 In an “Open Letter to E. O. Wilson,” the anthropology grad student Doris O’Donnell mocked the sociobiologist’s references to the “disappointed womb” and the ­human female’s “virtually continuous sexual activity” and condemned a “textbook bearing the imprimatur of Harvard” that “substituted folklore for fact” at ­women’s expense.39 231

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In other venues besides Science for the P ­ eople, SSG members made their critique of sexism heard. Richard Lewontin called out the “Victorian view of the relations between the sexes as a motivating force in ­human evolution” alongside sociobiology’s other errors.40 Gould argued that “the most immediate impact” of biological determinism “­will be felt as male privilege girds its loins to b ­ attle a growing w ­ omen’s movement.” 41 Although Gould’s paper at the 1978 AAAS sociobiology symposium—at which Wilson got doused—­did not specifically target the sexism of sociobiology, the symposium did include papers by the anthropologist Eleanor Leacock and by the psychologist Stephanie Shields. Leacock cited numerous ethnographic examples that contradicted David Barash’s “expectations” that males would always be competitive, and Shields argued that the study of gender differences “has consistently reflected” not biological real­ity but “prevailing cultural beliefs.” 42 Even amid t­ hese inclusive efforts, however, t­ here w ­ ere occasional rumblings of discontent from the feminists about their perceived secondary status within Science for the P ­ eople. In September  1974, about eigh­teen members of the Boston chapter, including Arditti, noted that they ­were “­doing good po­liti­cal work” in the organ­ization but felt nonetheless that they ­were “not dealing with the special prob­lems of ­women.” A recent meeting had focused on racism and elitism but had somehow never gotten around to sexism. It is easy to pretend, the ­women wrote, “that all remnants of sexism have been eliminated from the Boston chapter . . . ​but we ­women know it’s still ­there.” Their response was to form two groups: one, a study group devoted to socialist feminism, intended to make Science for the ­People stronger and more effective; the other, a support group to deal with sexism in the workplace and “even within Science for the ­People itself.” This latter group resembled the consciousness-­raising groups ubiquitous in the second wave feminist movement and echoed their rallying cry that the personal was po­liti­cal: “The larger context which created the prob­lems w ­ ill supplant our previous personal feelings that individual neuroses are the basis for negative experience.” 43 However critical they ­were of the parent organ­ization, the w ­ omen still saw their new groups as part of Science for the ­People, and they embarked on the ventures feeling “high and optimistic.” Although the organ­ization managed to contain ­these tensions—at least for a time—­they did not stop simmering. Despite getting their critiques into its magazine and forming groups ­under its auspices, some of the feminists continued to feel marginalized, as if they could never move 232

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the critique of sexism to the forefront of Science for the P ­ eople’s agenda.44 Their discontent was not destined to remain long out of sight. Soon a­ fter the publication of Sociobiology, feminist outrage emerged from the wings and took center stage.

The Critics Diverge For the feminists, the prob­lem was that the Sociobiology Study Group’s critique of Sociobiology targeted the book’s sexism, but always alongside its purported racism and classism, as the three equivalent subcategories of its overarching biological determinism. According to the SSG, Wilson’s justification of “existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex” (in that order) explained his popularity among certain readers.45 But the priorities never seemed to get inverted; sexism never seemed to receive top billing in the critique. In criticizing his “speculative reconstruction of h ­ uman prehistory,” for example, the SSG sandwiched Wilson’s view of sex roles in between his other problematic claims: “territoriality, big-­game hunting with females at home minding the kids and gathering vegetables . . . ​and a par­tic­ul­ar emphasis on warfare between bands and the salutary advantages of genocide.” 46 When denouncing the po­liti­cal implications of sociobiology, the SSG offered Wilson’s emphasis on the division of l­ abor between the sexes as a prime example.47 But Wilson’s sexism was consistently couched amid his other sins. Thus the sociobiological view of h ­ uman nature included “aggression, competition, extreme division of l­abor, the nuclear f­ amily, the domination of ­women by men, the defense of national territory, and individualism.” 48 His anthropomorphizing of animal be­hav­ior carried frequent sexist connotations, his examples and illustrations overwhelmingly featured and favored males, and he relied on ethnographies written solely from male perspectives without acknowledging their biases. “Such a subtle but effective organ­ization reveals the male supremacist perspective of the book,” the SSG averred.49 ­These critiques certainly drew attention to Wilson’s sexism, but always as subsidiary to a broader category. The prob­lem of the place of sexism in the SSG’s critique of Sociobi­ ology came to a head in a revealing exchange between Garland Allen, Ruth Hubbard, and Rita Arditti in Science for the ­People magazine. In the November-­December 1976 issue, Allen, a professor of biology and history of science at Washington University in St.  Louis, observed that the ­Sociobiology Study Group “had rightly pointed out the overt sexism” in 233

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Wilson’s book and popu­lar articles.50 Yet, Allen contended, the critique had neglected a po­liti­cal implication of Wilson’s argument even more dangerous, if less overt, that its sexism: its potential racism. Racists could easily seize on Wilson’s ge­ne­tic determinism and turn it t­ oward their own nefarious purposes. Allen’s letter left no doubt that racism was the greater evil than sexism. “Historically,” he explained, “racism bears within it an ultimate po­liti­cal potential for the ruling class which sexism has never displayed. ­Because even the ruling class is composed of both sexes in approximately equal numbers, sexism has never been used, and prob­ably ­will never be used, to the same extent as racism as a divisive tool.” Allen hastened to add that he did not mean that the SSG should downplay sexism; rather, that Wilson’s explicit sexism, underpinned by his biological determinism, would surely be used to justify “a very racist world view as well.” The “crude examples” of Jensen, Shockley, and Herrnstein had already shown the way. Thus, Allen concluded, “the fight cannot be against sexism alone, but sexism and its deadly counterpart, racism.”51 Hubbard and Arditti responded scathingly in the next issue.52 Allen, Hubbard wrote, showed “a complete lack of understanding of the role of sexism and its prob­lems, for it is the curse of sexism that it grants w ­ omen satellite status within the ruling class without granting them power,” the very definition of co-­optation. Moreover, she continued, a white male academic like Allen stood to lose more from the elimination of sexism than of racism, ­because “­every facet of his life is structured by the sexism that pervades our society; his ­family and professional life absolutely depend on it.” The inherent sexism of the nuclear ­family, in Hubbard’s view, was the principal reason that sociobiologists depicted it as “natu­ral,” since sexism was at the “very core” of sociobiology. “I see no use in arguing about who is oppresseder than who. But I am angry, b ­ ecause I feel that Gar’s argument is disingenuous.” Hubbard concluded not by discounting the significance of racism, but by underscoring the need to place opposition to sexism also front and center: “Racism is basic to western capitalism and imperialism, but sexism has been with us since before the biblical patriarchs. As a feminist and a socialist I am ready to fight both, but I cannot fight alongside men who feel the need to prove that racism is the greater and more basic evil.”53 Arditti also objected to Allen’s rank ordering the oppressions: “Setting up competitive situations is a typical male be­hav­ior pattern and that is what Allen is d ­ oing.” Allen did not seem aware, Arditti observed, “of the insights . . . ​developed by the feminist movement. The oppression of 234

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­ omen is so old, so rooted in our psyche and in our institutions that it w can be argued that sexual oppression provided the first model for other forms of h ­ uman oppression.”54 Arditti feared that Allen’s attitude would push back the clock to 1968, when awareness of sexism and the need to fight it ­were not, according to Arditti, part of the movement for social change. Indeed, what Arditti said about po­liti­cal movements more broadly could be applied to the debates about h ­ uman nature more specifically. Back in 1968, the critique of biological theories of ­human nature had deliberately excluded feminist perspectives, which existed in isolation and on the margins. By 1976, eight years l­ ater, the critique of Wilson’s sexism was very much a part of the SSG’s opposition to sociobiology. But how central it was, and w ­ hether the feminists felt properly acknowledged, w ­ ere still m ­ atters of contention. Allen’s letter was proof, as Arditti warned, that the gains made since 1968 ­were fragile.

A Feminist Awakening Feminists like Hubbard and Arditti suspected that the secondary status of the sexism charge in the Sociobiology Study Group’s critique reflected their own secondary status in the SSG and in Science for the P ­ eople as a ­whole. In an interview with Kelly Moore, Arditti recalled that “focusing on feminism in SftP ‘was a constant strug­gle. . . . ​It was like they wanted something on ­women ­because they knew they had to have something on ­women, but it had to be ­limited to what they wanted and it had to be something that they [the editorial collective] liked.’ ”55 As a result of ­these tensions, the feminists realized that it was vital to criticize and ultimately separate themselves from the other (male) critics of sociobiology and formulate their own broader critique of sexism in science. Hubbard’s c­ areer exemplifies this development. Like Rita Arditti, Naomi Weisstein, and many other feminist critics of the sciences of h ­ uman nature, Hubbard began her c­ areer as a practicing scientist whose encounter with the second wave feminist movement in the early 1970s proved transformative. Convinced that she could no longer simply do science, Hubbard turned from working biologist to critic of sexist practices and ideas in the sciences. However widely shared her experience, Hubbard’s ­career was also exceptional. Around the same time as her feminist awakening, Hubbard was appointed to a professorship in biology at Harvard. She used the visibility and centrality of this position to or­ga­nize the feminist critics of science and shape their critique according to her vision. 235

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Ruth Hubbard (née Hoffman) was born in Vienna in 1924, the ­daughter of two physicians, both Jewish socialists who had been medical students at Vienna General Hospital. Her childhood was happy, filled with books and ­music, her interest in science sparked by a close identification with her ­father. In March 1938, when the Nazis annexed Austria, one week ­after her ­fourteenth birthday, Ruth, her parents, and her younger ­brother Lawrence immigrated to the United States and settled in Brookline, Mas­sa­chu­setts. Ruth graduated from Brookline High School and enrolled in Radcliffe College intending to be a premedical student. Halfway through her college ­career, in December 1942, she married Frank Hubbard, a college friend who had been drafted into the army.56 “Science was taught very badly at Radcliffe,” she l­ ater recalled. The all-­male faculty was made up of Harvard professors on loan from the university. “In the introductory science courses, Harvard kept the best instructors for its own (male) students and sent us newly hired faculty who felt they w ­ ere ­doing us a ­favor by coming to the boondocks.” Her interest in biological research was not stoked u ­ ntil her se­nior year, when she began working in the Harvard laboratory of the biochemist George Wald, a researcher on vision. Upon graduation in 1944, Hubbard joined Wald’s lab on a war­time proj­ect, the beginning of her life in science.57 ­After the war, the Hubbards entered gradu­ate school at Harvard, she in biology, he in En­glish lit­er­at­ ure. Frank ­later quit to become a harpsichord maker, but Ruth discovered that she loved gradu­ate school. Wald’s lab worked on the photochemistry of the eye and on the transmission of light into visual information in the brain. Hubbard became fascinated by the prob­lem, too, focusing on rhodopsin, a pigment in the eye that absorbed light. The atmosphere of the lab was welcoming and friendly, and gender did not seem to Hubbard to be an issue. Men and ­women worked side by side and, she ­later recalled, “I did not have the po­ liti­cal acumen to notice that the positions of power and decision-­making always ­were occupied by men.”58 When she earned her PhD in biology in 1950, she found no prob­lem in obtaining postdoctoral fellowships in London and Copenhagen, but seemed scarcely aware that ­there was no talk of a professorship ­after that. Having separated from and ultimately divorced Frank, Hubbard returned to Harvard in 1953 and took up non-­ tenure-­track positions as research associate in Wald’s lab and lecturer in the biology department.59 By then, Hubbard and Wald had fallen in love, but for years kept their relationship a secret u ­ ntil Wald obtained a divorce from his first 236

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wife. Ruth and George married in 1958 and had two ­children together, Elijah (b. 1959) and Deborah (b. 1961). Marriage and motherhood required a shift in her self-­conception. “At the point at which I married George,” Hubbard recalled years ­later, “I had lived pretty much a completely male existence. I had gone through the motions of being a w ­ oman, married, had lovers, ­etc, but my identity was the prescribed, male, professional identity.” 60 Far from believing that marriage to an eminent scientist made her “impor­tant,” Hubbard saw “that point in my life as the point at which I became ‘unimportant’—­i.e., a wife, . . . ​and . . . ​almost immediately a ­mother.” 61 Having spent six months at home a­ fter Elijah was born, Hubbard eagerly returned to her scientific work.62 Hubbard’s feminist consciousness was not awakened u ­ ntil the early 1970s. Her politics had always been, like her parents’, leftist and pacifist; she opposed the Korean War, took her c­ hildren to anti–­Vietnam War demonstrations, and remained an antiwar activist all her life. But it was not ­until she began meeting with a group of other w ­ omen professionals at Harvard—­like Hubbard, in tenuous and low-­status positions as research associates, lecturers, and instructors—­that she realized how thoroughly her life and work as a scientist depended on Wald’s professorship, that “if he left Harvard, my own position at Harvard would dis­appear.” 63 Once she started talking to the other w ­ omen, “we realized that we had worked as hard and as long as our male counter­parts and w ­ ere as good and productive in our professions, but they had real jobs and ­were professors, while we had quasi-­positions and ­were outsiders who could be dropped at the flick of a pen.” 64 Fortunately for Hubbard, the collective realization coincided with Congress’s passage and President Richard Nixon’s signing into law in 1972 of the Education Amendments Act, including Title IX, which forbade universities from discriminating on the basis of gender, and of the striking down by the American Association of University Professors of the university’s formerly widely enacted “anti-­ nepotism rules,” which prevented spouses from being employed by the same academic institutions.65 ­These events, combined with pressure from w ­ omen’s groups and efforts on Hubbard’s behalf by some of her male colleagues, induced Harvard to offer her a professorship, as well as a few other similarly situated w ­ omen. In 1974, ­after nearly twenty-­five years in “off-­ladder” positions, Hubbard became the first tenured w ­ oman professor in the biology department at Harvard, the same institution that h ­ oused Gould, Lewontin, and Wilson (figure 7.1). But by then Hubbard’s attitude ­toward science had been transformed. She found that she was no longer asking questions about rhodopsin. 237

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7.1  Ruth Hubbard with a student at Radcliffe College in the 1970s.

Photo­graph by Starr Ockenga.

Instead, she wanted to know how science had become a male preserve and how that fact mattered for the production of scientific knowledge. “Once I had acknowledged to myself that not only I, but ­women as a group, had been outsiders to the relationship with nature that we call science, it became obvious to ask how our exclusion had ­shaped science,” she ­later wrote. “And once I allowed myself to ask that question, the gendered nature of science stared me in the face.” 66 The publication in 1975 of Wilson’s Sociobiology—­ which seemed to Hubbard to be sexism incarnate—­galvanized her into action. Determined not to be co-­opted by her accession to full faculty rank, Hubbard used her newly won position of power and prestige to practice and advocate for the feminist critique of sociobiology in par­tic­u­lar and of science more broadly. Beginning in 1975, instead of teaching straight biology courses, she developed and taught “Biology and ­Women’s Issues,” one of the first courses of its kind to examine the impact on science of the dearth of ­women scientists, and she wrote articles on the pervasive masculine bias of science. Although 238

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she felt uncomfortable at Harvard and admitted sometimes hating it, she stayed, subversively intending to undermine what she saw as the institution’s mission—­service to the corporate state—­“for the ends of liberation, real analy­sis and understanding, [and] positive action.” 67 In her articles from the mid-1970s, although sociobiology was always her main target, Hubbard presented a ­wholesale critique of science, arguing that scientific ideologies structured perception at the most fundamental levels. ­There was no pure, pre-­ideological perception; even ­children’s first encounters with nature ­were mediated through scientific categories. The biases thereby introduced w ­ ere so implicit, so taken for granted, that they became “primary percepts,” treated as s­ imple reflections of nature rather than assumptions imposed by the perceivers: “The very modes of asking and seeing that generate our science are determined by who we are, and when, and by what sorts of answers we seek.” 68 Citing Peter  L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Real­ity, Hubbard argued that implicit bias was an inescapable feature of how scientists saw the world and that students must learn how to bring such biases to conscious awareness and become critical of them. The argument had a distinctly po­liti­cal and feminist edge: science was historically conducted by men, and privileged white men at that, and its content could not help but reflect its masculine lineage.69 Hubbard presented a key example of such implicit bias in her comparison between scientific laboratories and families. In a description that undoubtedly reflected her own experiences in science, Hubbard wrote that most scientific laboratories, “are structured like the patriarchal h ­ ouse­hold”: In this ­house­hold, as in o ­ thers, roles are not evenly shared between ­women and men. The males, by and large, are (like sons) t­here to be trained in order to leave for the world in which they w ­ ill establish their own h ­ ouse­holds. The w ­ omen are ­there largely to help the men—as secretaries, dishwashers, technicians, assistants. If they fit in well, it is anticipated that they w ­ ill remain at least u ­ ntil they marry and have c­ hildren. Many laboratories also have a wife-­mother figure, usually an older secretary or technician whose loyalty to the professor and the laboratory is what keeps both g­ oing. Occasionally she is a scientist who, a­ fter surveying the scene and seeing how few desirable and autonomous positions ­there are for w ­ omen, has made a semi-­permanent niche for herself within the patriarchal home.70 239

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None of this should be surprising, Hubbard concluded, since familiar social structures—­those implicit but power­ful biases—­replicated themselves in social situations, and since science was a social practice, it was no exception. The critique, in pointing out that all of science, even down to the level of perception, was structured by bias, went well beyond the feminist criticisms that Naomi Weisstein and Lila Leibowitz had made of pop ethology, since both had argued that bias could be rooted out by better, purer, more realistic science. Hubbard rejected that view as naïve. Instead, like Arditti, Hubbard argued that scientific neutrality was a myth and that an infusion of feminist philosophy was needed to change scientists’ power­ful, entrenched preconceptions. Hubbard’s recognition that sexism was fundamental to science also became the centerpiece of her critique of sociobiology. In this her critique diverged from the Sociobiology Study Group’s. For the SSG, sexism, alongside the other pernicious isms, had been a subset and an exemplar of the overarching prob­lem with sociobiology: biological determinism. But Hubbard, like Arditti, raised sexism to the paramount position, and treated sociobiology as one subcategory of scientific sexism. For t­ hese feminists, the revelation of pervasive sexism became the lens through which to view all of science. From the patriarchal organ­ization of laboratories to the exclusion of w ­ omen, poor p ­ eople, and minorities from the creation and pursuit of scientific knowledge to the pejorative, demeaning, and derogatory words and theories used to describe ­women’s bodies and brains and the be­hav­ior of female animals, sexism was the overarching category and the most fundamental and dangerous prob­lem. Sexism helped justify racism and classism, and sexism was the chain that yoked together dif­ fer­ent branches of biology: sociobiology, Darwinism, hormone biology, and ge­ne­tics. Hubbard categorized sociobiology as just one example among many of sexist biology, alongside medical specialties like obstetrics and gynecol­ogy that turned normal aspects of female biology into conditions requiring treatment, and alongside Darwin’s assertions in the Descent of Man about female intellectual inferiority.

­Women Return the Gaze Once her position at Harvard was secure, Ruth Hubbard sought to consolidate her feminist criticisms of sociobiology and of science. Her effort resulted in a book she co­wrote and coedited in fall 1977 called ­Women Look at Biology Looking at ­Women. The book was a product of the collabo240

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ration between Hubbard and her students in the Radcliffe seminar that she had taught since 1975, Biology and W ­ omen’s Issues, dedicated to exposing the myths that surrounded w ­ omen’s biology and that “bolstered sexist social practices.” “­Women’s biology,” the book affirmed, “not only is not destiny, but it is often not even biology.”71 The book’s title was telling: ­after centuries of being the object of the male gaze, ­women ­were fi­nally putting biology and medicine ­under a critical lens. Hubbard’s own essay, “Have Only Men Evolved?” made a trenchant critique of sexism in evolutionary biology, from Darwin to ethology to sociobiology. As she had argued in her 1976 essays, this tradition could not simply be called “biological determinism.” It had, rather, to be identified specifically and clearly as sexism. It was precisely its pejorative depiction of ­women’s nature and be­hav­ior—to use Hubbard’s term for it, “androcentrism (male-­centeredness)”—­that was the prob­lem with sociobiology and its pre­de­ces­sors.72 For Hubbard, Darwin’s theory of sexual se­lection provided evidence of his debt to and warping by the pervasive sexism of Victorian society. His claim in The Descent of Man that males displayed their superiority while females passively chose among them reflected nothing more than Victorian sexual mores applied to the animal world. “Make no ­mistake,” Hubbard affirmed, “wherever you look among animals, eagerly promiscuous males are pursuing females, who peer from ­behind languidly drooping eyelids to discern the strongest and handsomest. Does it not sound like the wishfulfillment dream of a proper Victorian gentleman?” Hubbard singled out the male critics for ignoring this rampant and obvious sexism: “For although the ethnocentric bias of Darwinism is widely acknowledged, its blatant sexism . . . ​is rarely mentioned, presumably ­because it has not been noticed by Darwin scholars, who have mostly been men.”73 “Biological determinism” clearly would not cut it; any critique worth its feminist salt had to make sexism its cornerstone. Ethology and sociobiology w ­ ere similarly, in Hubbard’s view, a “new scientific sexism.” Sociobiologists had attached g­ reat significance to anisogamy, the size difference between sperm and egg, asserting that males and females must “invest” very dif­fer­ent amounts of energy in reproduction; as a result, “men are promiscuous while ­women stay home and faithfully care for the babies.”74 Hubbard could barely conceal her disgust: “Clearly, androcentric biology is busy as ever trying to provide biological ‘reasons’ for a par­tic­u­lar set of social arrangements.”75 Her summary of Darwinian tropes in h ­ uman evolution dripped with sarcasm: man the 241

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toolmaker and hunter drove evolutionary pro­gress “while over on the side long-­haired, broad bottomed females nurse[d] infants at their pendulous breasts.” Even when “­Woman the gatherer” played a role, male anthropologists assumed that the ­women stuck close to home—­a “fantastically ­limited and stereotypic picture.”76 Hubbard deliberately couched her critique in an appeal to the “social construction” of science, thereby questioning the assertion that bad, sexist science could simply be remedied by better, truer, and purer science. Her essay hinged on an anti-­positivist philosophy of science—­that what scientists observed and thus what they came to believe was true ­were not ­simple reflections of nature but rather depended to a ­great extent on what their circumstances (social, cultural, professional) prepared or primed them to observe. Citing Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 Structure of Sci­ entific Revolutions, Hubbard argued that phenomena that fell outside the scientist’s accepted frame of reference often w ­ ere not perceived at all. The very language that scientists used constrained, ­limited, and restricted what they could express and thus “presented the limits of real­ity as we know it.”77 The frameworks in turn depended on the social and po­liti­cal contexts in which they arose. ­These features of science often made scientific theories self-­fulfilling: experiments revealed just what the experimenters expected. Crucially, for Hubbard as for Kuhn, t­hese ­were features not just of “bad science” but of all science. Unlike Kuhn, however, Hubbard gave the social constructivist argument a feminist slant completely absent from the original. She argued that the best example of the social construction of scientific knowledge was offered by the sciences of biology and be­hav­ior—­sciences almost completely missing from Kuhn’s book—­for, in Hubbard’s view, they ­were thoroughly s­ haped by the male scientific community’s implicit assumptions about gender. Sociobiology, for example, arose at a moment when the ­women’s movement was posting substantial gains, a conjunction that Hubbard refused to see as purely coincidental. When sociobiologists looked at sperm and egg and saw men’s and ­women’s social roles, their observations w ­ ere unmistakably s­ haped (­whether they admitted it or not) by a sociopo­liti­cal need to repudiate feminist advances.78 ­Because pure science was a myth, however, feminists should not simply expect to replace such androcentric science with that which was unbiased. The point, rather, was to search out and identify the usually implicit, unconscious biases that ­were part and parcel of scientific work. Better science would not mean unbiased; it would mean that scientists 242

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had become aware and critical of their assumptions. A distinct po­liti­cal urgency underlay this philosophy. It was b ­ ecause scientific theories became “effective tools for oppression,” ­because they ­were socially dangerous, that they had to be exposed, rooted out, and replaced. “What can we do,” Hubbard asked, “to restructure and rename our scientific world?”79 Other papers in the volume took up Hubbard’s social constructivist emphasis. Barbara Fried examined John ­Money’s work on “fetally androgenized” girls, who w ­ ere exposed while still in the womb to unusually high levels of androgen, the supposedly “male” hormone. Money had claimed that the girls acted “tomboyish,” attempting to cement a link between brains, hormones, and be­hav­ior. E. O. Wilson cited M ­ oney’s work approvingly and used it to support the sociobiological claim that be­hav­ior was naturally sex differentiated, but Fried decimated M ­ oney’s assertions, pointing out that his definition of what constituted “tomboyish” be­hav­ior was already weighted with cultural presuppositions. Adopting Hubbard’s theme that language constructed the perception and communication of what counted as facts, Fried argued that Money chose language already sharply differentiated by sex, thus it was no coincidence that he discovered sexually differentiated be­hav­ior.80 Susan Leigh Star, similarly, attacked the pejorative language that constructed conceptions of sex differences in studies of brain lateralization. She criticized as false and ste­reo­typed research that cast the “right brain” as masculine and the “left brain” as feminine, the former associated with positive modes of thinking and feeling, the latter with negative modes.81 Another group of papers examined the demeaning repre­sen­ta­tions of w ­ omen in popu­lar media portrayals of menstruation, menopause, and anorexia, repre­sen­ta­tions that pathologized and demonized w ­ omen’s bodies. The menstruation essay ended with a short story imagining a world where menstruation was celebrated as an occasion for female bonding.82 The book sought to create a community of ­women in science, to affirm their historical participation in science and medicine and to bind them together in the present-­day strug­gle. Several papers examined ­women’s history in the medical professions—in which they w ­ ere devalued as midwives, then excluded from mainstream medical schools and practices.83 A paper by Naomi Weisstein, at the time of writing a professor of psy­chol­ogy at SUNY-­Buffalo, brought the theme into the late twentieth ­century. Her contribution reflected on her experiences of being “young, gifted, and female in the sciences.” She recounted in poignant and 243

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­ arrowing detail a ­career continuously hamstrung by blatant sexism, h both personal and institutional. But it was not her “extraordinary strength,” Weisstein noted, that had allowed her to persist and go on to have a s­uccessful c­ areer. It was her connection to the ­women’s movement. “If the scientific world has changed since I entered it,” she wrote, “it is not ­because I managed to become an established psychologist within it. Rather, it is b ­ ecause a ­women’s movement came along to change its character.”84 In their epilogue to the volume, Hubbard and her coeditors stressed the importance of organ­izing a vis­i­ble feminist presence in the sciences. ­Women who had “made it,” who had been admitted to the scientists’ club, especially t­ hose very few who had ascended to the top of the professional ladder—­like Weisstein and Hubbard herself—­bore the responsibility not to remain isolated from each other. If they did, successful ­women scientists stood in danger of being co-­opted by the system, of emerging from their educations as “the monolith’s true devotees,” of being so grateful for their success, and so dependent on the establishment, that they became apologists for the status quo.85 Even if affirmative action granted ­women equal access, they could be “rendered harmless” by being granted “full membership in the club provided we accept its rules.” Accepting the rules and keeping quiet w ­ ere not options. Remaining isolated meant simply becoming tokens whose membership made no difference.86 Instead, ­women scientists had to band together, to reveal the repeated patterns of oppression and the systemic exclusion that the rituals of membership ­were designed to obscure. Ultimately Hubbard’s aim was not only to get more w ­ omen into the sciences but, by d ­ oing so, to create a new science altogether. A tiny white male professional elite would then no longer dominate an exploited, subservient female underclass, nor would androcentric science dominate nature. If it was the case that science was a “­human construct,” ­shaped by the ­people who did it, then who ­those ­people w ­ ere should make an enormous difference. Hubbard’s volume was not simply a critique of sexist theories in sociobiology, or even in biology more generally: it was a ­wholesale critique of the culture and practice of science as a male-­dominated endeavor. But inclusive as she was, Hubbard did not consider all feminist approaches to be equal. Rather, she defined the feminist critique in a certain way and determined the proper strategy for the critics. Any feminist, for example, who upheld the natu­ral superiority of w ­ omen, as Montagu had, was misguided. Developing a rival essentialism—an “estrocentric” 244

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theory of w ­ omen’s nature to cancel out the androcentric ones—­was deeply problematic ­because it subscribed to the same view that be­hav­ior was biologically determined as the androcentric theories it rejected. Both Elaine Morgan and Evelyn Reed had, according to Hubbard, taken this essentialist route, and she accordingly excluded them from her feminist proj­ect.87 Paring away the social and cultural values to try to unearth the “facts,” as some feminists attempted to do, was an equally flawed approach, since it ignored the constructivist argument that the facts w ­ ere always theory laden. The better way, in Hubbard’s view, was to work to expose the male myths, work that was easier for w ­ omen to do, not b ­ ecause of any essential difference or superiority, but ­because they ­were so often marginal to the mainstream.88 For Hubbard, staunch anti-­essentialism and embrace of social constructivism w ­ ere fundamental ele­ments of any feminist critique. In effect, t­ hese commitments served as litmus tests by which she de­cided who was a worthy critic and who was not.

The ­Women Scientists Or­ga­nize Hubbard’s conviction that w ­ omen scientists needed their own forum—­ their own vis­i­ble and or­ga­nized presence in science—­was widely shared. At the same time that she was formulating her critique in her articles and edited volume, a group of w ­ omen scientists, led by the comparative psychologist Ethel Tobach and the endocrinologist Betty Rosoff, was creating just the kind of alternative organ­ization Hubbard had in mind—an organ­ ization they called the Genes and Gender Collective. Founded in 1977, as entirely separate from the Sociobiology Study Group, the collective had its own publication, which took over from Science for the ­People magazine as the principal outlet for feminist criticism of sociobiology and of science. In this organ­ization established by and for ­women scientists, Hubbard would come to play a leading role. The Genes and Gender Collective or­ga­nized its first meeting—­a conference titled “Hereditarianism and ­Women”—on January  29, 1977, at the American Museum of Natu­ral History in New York City. Catalyzed by the publication of Wilson’s Sociobiology and the ­earlier awarding of the Nobel Prize to Konrad Lorenz, the conference featured w ­ omen scientists from dif­fer­ent disciplines who aimed to expose the myth of “ge­ ne­tic destiny” and its especially destructive consequences for w ­ omen. (See figure 7.2.) Tobach, a researcher in the department of animal be­ hav­ior at the museum, and Rosoff, professor of biology at Stern College 245

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7.2  The comparative psychologist Ethel Tobach.

in Manhattan, had expected around fifty ­people to show up. Instead, 350 came: “parents with ­children, gray heads, working w ­ omen, ­people of many ethnic backgrounds, academics and students.” The conference had evidently met a need, and the speakers aimed to show the w ­ omen who attended “how to turn science into a force for their liberation.” At the day’s end the attendees voted not to take back their registration fees but to put them t­ oward publication of the five conference talks. Edited and framed with prologue and epilogue by Rosoff and Tobach, the slim volume Genes and Gender: I appeared in 1978.89 The expectation was that it was to be only the first of many. The 1977 conference marked a key turning point in the sociobiology debate. Whereas the e­ arlier “­woman’s groups” had met u ­ nder the auspices of Science for the ­People, now, for the first time, the feminist critics met as a group in­de­pen­dent of any larger organ­ization. And whereas e­ arlier feminist critics of pop ethology and sociobiology had tended to speak out as isolated individuals—as Reed, Arditti, Weisstein, and Hubbard had—­the 1977 conference heralded the emergence of an or­ga­nized feminist presence in the landscape of the debate. Tobach and Rosoff explained that the 246

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only requirement for participation in their new Genes and Gender Collective was “a shared commitment to refute the scientific claims of ge­ne­tic determinism as epitomized by Wilson’s Sociobiology and its adherents and to expose its effects as expressed in discrimination against ­women and ethnic and racial minorities.”90 Although sociobiology was their chief target, the conference speakers consistently placed it alongside other instances of sexism in biology, thus making a broader attack on the sciences of ­human nature than the male critics of sociobiology had. “Sexism,” as the conference program put it, “is at the core of many recent publications that attempt to interpret w ­ omen’s social roles as ‘biologically’ or ‘genet­ically’ determined” (figure 7.3).91 The speakers used three dif­fer­ent arguments to attack the myth that ­women ­were doomed to exploitation and oppression ­because of their ge­ ne­tic makeup. First, they emphasized the importance of gene-­environment interactions. Biology (genes and hormones) determined the physical features of the female reproductive system, but did not, and could not, “determine” be­hav­ior, as the papers by the ge­ne­ticist Lee Ehrman and by the biochemist Anne Briscoe explained. Between genes and be­hav­ior “­there are many ­factors that determine how ­these genes ­will act,” Tobach and Rosoff said in their epilogue.92 It followed that any theory that traced ­women’s be­hav­ior solely to their ge­ne­tic makeup must be wrong. Tobach and Rosoff reserved special ire for assertions about “instinct”—­whether aggressive or maternal—­which, they said, afforded no basis for h ­ uman rights. Rights did not stem from biological makeup, but from ­every h ­ uman being’s inalienable claim to be ­free from oppression. Second, the speakers showed that the sociobiological declaration of universal male dominance and universal female submission relied on a narrow and selective reading of the anthropological and primatological evidence. The social anthropologist Eleanor Leacock—in a preview of her critique at the 1978 AAAS Symposium—­pointed out that descriptions of the sexual division of ­labor in ­human socie­ties ­were a mass of conflicting generalizations, and that sociobiologists chose t­ hose that matched their presuppositions about aggressive males and stay-­at-­home wives and ­mothers. In fact, depending on what culture they analyzed, as well as when and by whom they w ­ ere written, ethnographic accounts differed vastly in their portrayal of men’s and w ­ omen’s activities. Sociobiological accounts typically projected Western ideals and norms onto other cultures and ignored any historical changes in t­ hose cultures with the advent of colonialism. 247

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E. O. Wilson, for example, in claiming a ge­ne­tic basis for hunting men and homebound ­women, relied on Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore’s study of hunter-­gatherer cultures, but even Lee and DeVore affirmed that ­women’s foraging, in providing the bulk of the band’s sustenance, regularly took them miles from home. Wilson also ignored w ­ omen workers in Eu­ro­ pean history—as slaves, in factories, in nunneries.93 Conflicting accounts of sex roles abounded in primatology, too: for ­every status-­seeking male baboon, ­there was a social, cooperative chimpanzee troupe. Whose account one chose to believe mattered. Universal male dominance was a myth maintained only by ignoring cultural, historical, and animal diversity. Third, while scientific sexism was the GGC’s priority, the conferees considered gender and racial oppression as mutually reinforcing. The 248

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7.3  (a and b) The program of the first Genes and Gender conference,

held January 29, 1977, at the American Museum of Natu­ral History.

microbiologist and civil rights activist Dorothy C. Burnham detected hy­ poc­risy in discussions of sex and race differences: while white w ­ omen ­were considered delicate and in need of protection, Black w ­ omen could be expected to work all day in the fields. Men would supposedly always dominate ­because their hormones made them aggressive (so claimed Steven Goldberg in his 1973 The Inevitability of Patriarchy), but Blacks and ­women, Burnham observed, ­were “unrewarded” for aggressive be­hav­ior and thus unlikely to display it. She handily dispatched Wilson’s invocation of “academic vigilantism,” the freedom of speech defense he had deployed against his critics: “I do not . . . ​believe that anyone in Amer­ic­ a 249

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t­ oday would be given money, facilities, or publication privileges to prove a thesis relating to some supposed inferiority of white Angle-­Saxon males.” Burnham opposed, as Hubbard had, any effort to decide “who was oppresseder than who.” “Racism and sexism interact and reinforce each other, and the effort of both is not arithmetical but geometrical,” Burnham declared. “If I sound more like a Black feminist than a biologist, the reason is—­that’s what I was first.”94 No science that started from the premise of any group’s inferiority could ever produce anything of value. Tobach and Rosoff reinforced this intersectional perspective. “Together, w ­ omen, Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and all oppressed minorities can expose the myths meant to defeat them.”95 Hereditarianism was a tool to divide and conquer and could not go unchallenged.

Defining the Feminist Proj­ect The Genes and Gender Collective gathered for a second time at the February 1978 AAAS meeting in Washington, DC, the same conference at which the Committee Against Racism dumped the pitcher of ice w ­ ater on E. O. Wilson at the sociobiology symposium. Ruth Hubbard and Marian Lowe, a chemist and environmentalist activist at Boston University, w ­ ere the co-­organizers and coeditors of the volume that resulted, the second in Tobach and Rosoff ’s series.96 The volume reinforced the themes of Genes and Gender I: the contributors to Genes and Gender II ­were also all ­women scientists and feminists who both took aim at sociobiology and made a broader critique of sexism in science. But Hubbard also used the opportunity to shape the feminist critique according to her own priorities and bring her distinctive feminist vision to an even wider stage. Genes and Gender II examined theories of brain structure and function, and of hormone-­behavior interactions, as well as of evolutionary theories from ethology to sociobiology. The collective argued that each of ­these branches of sexist science ­were direct descendants of Victorian ideas and assumptions, arising to defend the status quo at moments when ­women entered the workforce and made social gains. New flowerings of the ­women’s movement necessitated new theories of w ­ omen’s inferiority: the contributors to the volume made this link secure. Hubbard and Lowe also developed the philosophical aspects of the argument. Continuing the anti-­positivist strain that Hubbard had already championed, they argued that science is not a s­ imple reflection of real­ity but a h ­ uman construct that provides frameworks within which all ob250

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servation is made. Scientists—­overwhelmingly white, male, and upper class—­were not disinterested observers but w ­ ere primed to make observations that justified their privileged positions. T ­ hese elite scientists specifically looked for race and sex differences and purposely constructed hierarchies by group. Their observations of the data ­were not exhaustive of all possibilities but reflected their choices, both explicit and implicit. It took ­people outside the conventional framework—­women and ­others in marginalized positions—to see the pro­cess for what it was and to critique it.97 In her contribution, the anthropologist Lila Leibowitz, a professor at Northeastern University, made a careful review of Wilson’s evidence for “universal male dominance” in primate species and found, as Eleanor Leacock had, that the phenomenon was far from universal. Leibowitz cited work by the primatologists Thelma Rowell and Jane Lancaster to redefine dominance, making it seem much less common, much less a ­matter of stable hierarchies, and much less tied to survival and reproductive success. Wilson’s claim for universal male dominance, Leibowitz argued, was pseudo-­biology, “po­liti­cal propaganda” aimed to justify current social arrangements.98 Wilson’s appeal to biology imposed the American nuclear definition of ­family on primate groupings, even though Leibowitz’s own ethnographic work on the ­family showed that its meaning varied vastly across cultures.99 Ruth Bleier, neuroanatomist and professor of w ­ omen’s studies at the University of Wisconsin–­Madison, emphasized that the feminist critique must attack sexism in science across the board. Sexism was even more fundamental and pervasive than racism, since the critique of sexism had the potential to shake all the institutions of society to their core. Like Hubbard, Bleier pointed to the implicit, subtle, unspoken assumptions and biases at work in science, the most fundamental of which was “Western androcentrism.” Bleier argued that findings on rat hormones and sexual be­hav­ior could not be extrapolated to h ­ umans, since h ­ uman sexual be­hav­ior happened in a context, was “culture dependent and multi-­ dimensional,” and occurred in response to “cultural cues.” For this reason, animal models of be­hav­ior posed a prob­lem and, sounding like the l­ater Montagu, Bleier bluntly asserted that “­there is no ­human nature.”100 Turning to theories of male aggression and dominance, Bleier again echoed Montagu’s critique of the overly broad use of “aggressivity,” which included every­thing from combativeness to assertiveness to creativity. But her feminism went well beyond Montagu’s. Bleier called for feminist 251

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alternatives to the conventional “evolutionary my­thol­ogy” that “men evolved while ­women incubated.” In fact, W ­ oman the gatherer was an equally impor­tant source of ­human cultural development and innovation. With the advent of sedentary farming and herding communities, w ­ omen lost the central position they had once held in society, but this demotion was a historical and cultural product, not a reflection of ­women’s innate nature. As for Hubbard, for Bleier the reclaiming of language and thus the ability to create knowledge ­were key. “The namers and sayers have been men,” Bleier wrote. W ­ omen’s voices had been repressed but w ­ ere starting to break out of their collective silence, to deconstruct “phallogocentric” scholarship and discourse and “construct a new language, a new scholarship, a new knowledge that is ­whole.”101 Freda Salzman, the University of Mas­sa­chu­setts–­Boston physicist, reprised the critique she had made in Science for the ­People of research on sex hormones and be­hav­ior. She disputed John ­Money’s claim that girls exposed to high levels of androgen while still in the womb displayed “masculinized” be­hav­ior ­because of the ways in which the hormone affected their brains. The girls’ be­hav­ior could just as well be explained by environmental cues, such as treatment by parents. Moreover, finding controls for such experiments was practically impossible; no two of the experimental or so-­called normal subjects ­were raised in precisely the same circumstances, and as a result the variable environments vitiated any conclusions about the biological roots of their be­hav­ior.102 Anthropological evidence for sex differences in aggressive be­hav­ior was just as problematic as the endocrinological. Studies claiming that boys engaged in more “rough and tumble play” than girls could be readily explained by the fact that boys and girls ­were “treated differently from the time social interactions begin following birth.” As a result, Salzman argued, studies that attempted to differentiate between ­human groups or individuals on the basis of hormonal or ge­ne­tic differences—­that, in effect, claimed to separate nature from nurture—­would have had precisely to control the environment in which their subjects w ­ ere raised to eliminate both “sex differentiated treatment by child rearers . . . ​[and] sex biased interpretations by the observers.” The experiments that Salzman discussed did not come anywhere near meeting ­those conditions. Given the “highly charged and multiple meanings” of the word “aggression,” Salzman argued that it was not only wrong, but also “thoroughly irresponsible—­and dishonest—of behavioral scientists to denote as ‘aggression’ . . . ​the cluster of be­hav­iors observed in very young ­children that is 252

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called ‘rough and tumble play.’ ” But rather than “carefully avoiding the ambiguities” inherent in the term, “some behavioral scientists seem to exploit it.”103 In their own contribution, Lowe and Hubbard sought to define the feminist proj­ect by identifying and excluding t­ hose critics who failed to take the proper approach.104 Alice Rossi was their case in point. Rossi was a sociologist who had carried out a highly regarded 1964 survey of w ­ omen scientists that concluded that their low numbers did not stem from any inherent inability, but from the mismatch between the demands of a scientific life and the domestic burdens that ­women ­were expected to shoulder.105 By the 1970s, however, Rossi had begun incorporating evolutionary biology and neuroendocrinology into her analy­sis of ­women and the ­family, arguing that sociology had to come to terms with what was innate.106 Rossi’s “biosocial perspective” claimed that “biological contributions shape what is learned, and that t­ here are differences in the ease with which the sexes can learn certain t­ hings.”107 She stressed that this was not a m ­ atter of generic determination, but of “contributions,” and that her perspective was therefore an improvement on sociobiology. But Lowe and Hubbard failed to discern any appreciable difference: like Wilson’s, Rossi’s was an essentialist theory, and a true feminist critique must reject essentialism. The only biological difference between ­women and men was that w ­ omen gestate and lactate and men inseminate; any other behavioral differences between the sexes—­greater female nurturance, greater male aggression—­were the result solely of social and cultural conditioning. This opposition to essentialism ran so deep in Lowe and Hubbard’s definition of feminism that anyone who departed from it, even a self-­ proclaimed advocate for ­women like Rossi, was simply not a feminist.108 Even supposed universals, such as the female propensity for mothering, could be shown on closer inspection not to be universals at all; and in any case, “universal” need not imply “ge­ne­tic,” since such be­hav­iors could simply be analogous solutions to common environmental prob­lems, rather than homologous traits sharing a ge­ne­tic and evolutionary basis. The assumption of a ge­ne­tic root was an error, and anyone who committed it was suspect. In their conclusion to Genes and Gender II, Lowe and Hubbard underscored the key themes of their feminist critique.109 First, they took a strong interactionist stance: ge­ne­tics and environment interacted at e­ very level, and their influences w ­ ere impossible to separate out. Since the 253

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i­mportance and role of ge­ne­tic f­actors varied with the environment, and ­because environment continuously affected the expression of the genes, any comparison between dif­f er­ent ge­ne­tic groups would be clouded if the environments to which t­ hose groups ­were exposed differed in any way. At the very most, one could ask how much the observed variation in individuals’ be­hav­ior was caused by genes and how much by environment, but not how much one single be­hav­ior was caused by e­ ither.110 This was obviously not a “radical environmental” position. Nor did it flirt with essentialism, the belief in a pure untrammeled connection between be­ hav­ior and some posited biological core. Second, Lowe and Hubbard took an anti-­positivist position. All science was done in a social context and within the framework of a “paradigm,” and ­these constrained what questions scientists asked, what they observed, and what they considered worth knowing. The feminist critics gave Kuhn’s theory a distinctly feminist spin and combined their attack on sociobiology with a w ­ holesale critique of science. Fi­nally, they argued that theories of sex differences in mentality and be­hav­ior served a power­ful legitimizing and justifying function. Society needed them to keep ­women in their place, and the theories did often act as self-­fulfilling prophecies, convincing ­women that re­sis­tance was futile. Hubbard and Lowe deemed it no coincidence that theories of sex differences arose at times of feminist advance. The deforming impact of such theories on ­women’s lives and on ­women’s imagination of what was pos­si­ble lent their critique its urgency. The solution, Hubbard and Lowe proclaimed, was to deconstruct and avoid ste­reo­types and essentialism, and not be tempted to turn to a rival essentialism like Rossi’s.

Failed Alliances In its staunch anti-­essentialism, its gene-­environment interactionism, its excoriation of sexism in the sciences of ­human nature, and its social constructivism, the Genes and Gender Collective represented a unique outpost in the landscape of the sociobiology debate. Nevertheless, this constellation of commitments prevented the feminist critics from forming alliances with other potentially sympathetic groups in the debate. The GGC and the Sociobiology Study Group shared few of the same members. Ruth Hubbard had been an original member of the SSG but left it to or­ga­nize and attend the second meeting of the GGC instead. ­Eleanor Leacock, a speaker at the first GGC meeting, also spoke at the 254

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sociobiology symposium at the 1978 AAAS alongside the SSG member Stephen Jay Gould. Freda Salzman spoke at GGC II and penned feminist criticism for Science for the ­People magazine. Other­wise, however, the overlap between the GGC and the SSG was minimal. As the critics w ­ ere segregated, so w ­ ere their arguments. When male critics of sociobiology put together anthologies of essays, which did much to define the contours of the debate, feminist critiques w ­ ere con­ spic­u­ous by their absence. Arthur Caplan’s 1978 edited volume, for example, The Sociobiology Debate: Readings on Ethical and Scientific Issues, included an essay by Ethel Tobach, one of only two w ­ omen among the forty-­two authors in the volume, but her critique of sociobiology attacked its ge­ne­tic reductionism, not its sexism.111 Tobach was at the very same moment actively organ­izing the Genes and Gender Collective’s meetings and volumes, but her contribution to Caplan’s volume made no mention of her feminist perspective: she evidently chose to keep the two ave­nues of her critique separate from each other. What was appropriate and expected in one context was entirely missing from the other. Similarly, Ashley Montagu’s 1980 edited collection included its token w ­ oman author, the British moral phi­los­o­pher Mary Midgely, and although the volume included two essays by her, neither one made a critique of the sexism of sociobiology.112 Feminist sociobiology might have made a natu­ral ally for critics looking to condemn the sexism of conventional sociobiology, but this potential alignment largely failed. Some of the authors in Genes and Gender II cited work by feminist primatologists approvingly and clearly shared an interest in bringing females out of the margins and into the center of the evolutionary picture. The anti-­essentialism, however, championed by Hubbard and like-­minded feminist critics, meant that the shared interest could go only so far.113 Their exchanges with the feminist sociobiologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy illustrate this divergence. In her book The W ­ oman That Never Evolved, Hrdy, a protégée of Wilson’s, took an avowedly feminist perspective in documenting the lives of female primates. In Hrdy’s view, evolutionary biology and sociobiology had paid nearly exclusive attention to males, male strug­gles for dominance, and male strategies for reproductive success. Females, both animal and ­human, ­were relegated to the sidelines “waiting at the campsites for their men to return.”114 It was not surprising, Hrdy acknowledged, that the century-­long schism between feminism and evolutionary biology had yet to be overcome. 255

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But ­there was nothing “inherently sexist” about the science, in Hrdy’s view: it had just focused too much in one place and needed to switch perspectives. Her own sociobiological study examined the reproductive strategies of female Hanuman langurs. Male dominance over females was an obvious and universal feature of langur society, but Hrdy found that females possessed their own kind of power: while male power was wielded openly and directly, females wielded theirs more subtly and manipulatively. “­Every female,” Hrdy wrote, “is essentially a competitive, strategizing creature.”115 If we wanted to understand why male dominance persisted in ­human society, and if we wanted to do something about it, we had to understand its evolutionary origins and primate counter­ parts. Hrdy argued, for example, that the failure of ­women to bond in a singular voting bloc must have something to do with the underhanded strategizing females exercised across evolutionary history. Naomi Weisstein, reviewing Hrdy’s book in Ms. magazine, approved of Hrdy’s focus on females. But, Weisstein wrote, “Hrdy’s interpretations, solidly within sociobiology, differ markedly from my own.”116 Hrdy insisted on an unbroken biological link between male dominance in primates and male dominance in h ­ umans. Weisstein, in contrast, pointed out that Hrdy’s own data had shown that relations between the sexes in primate species, even within the same species, could change radically with changes in the environment, moreover, that females ­were usually anything but subordinate. “Biology shows us that the subjugation of ­women is anything but natu­ral and fixed,” Weisstein wrote. “We belong to an order stunningly flexible in its social arrangements and capable of ­great change within species.” What was in the genes was not “a specific social be­hav­ior like dominance,” as essentialism maintained, “but a general social understanding.”117 It followed that although h ­ umans might indeed display virulent male dominance, this was no primate inheritance but a relatively recent cultural acquisition contemporaneous with domestication and agriculture. When it came to the attribution of present-­day social arrangements to a biological or evolutionary basis, Hubbard similarly parted ways from Hrdy. For Hrdy, the sexual power asymmetry stemmed ultimately from anisogamy and the correspondingly differential amounts of energy invested in reproduction by males and females.118 In Hrdy’s view, b ­ ecause they had fewer gametes than males, females would generally have fewer offspring and would need to expend more time and effort in providing and caring for t­ hose offspring. Hubbard objected that however dif­fer­ent in 256

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size male and female gametes w ­ ere, it was far from clear how to translate that size difference into the “energy” expenditures of men and ­women.119 Did it ­really take more energy to produce fewer larger eggs than millions of tiny sperm? It was true that the growing embryo used some of the food metabolized by its m ­ other, thus it was impor­tant to make sure pregnant ­women got enough to eat. But Hubbard identified a fallacy in the slippage from that fact to the assumption that such metabolic functions represented an investment of the w ­ omen’s “energy.” “To speak of a fetus as a drain on a pregnant ­woman’s energy is reminiscent of the way physicians in the nineteenth c­ entury spoke of menstruation as requiring ‘energy’ when they argued that girls who taxed their brains by becoming educated would not be able to have ­children when they grew up.”120 Hrdy retorted that Hubbard’s view assumed “an infinite resource base,” a kind of “American supermarket mentality” that failed to acknowledge “just how difficult it is in the natu­ral world to obtain the resources necessary to reproduce” and was therefore “not pertinent to mammalian evolution.”121 For Hrdy this evolutionary legacy could not have failed to leave its mark on ­human social roles. For Hubbard, on the other hand, it was this very link, from biological facts to assumptions about ­human social roles—­the definition of essentialism—­that she sought to break.

A Tale of Two Debates E. O. Wilson was well aware of the feminist criticism of sociobiology. But his response was not the same outrage he expressed when confronted with the charge of racism. In personal letters that he exchanged with Lionel Tiger in 1980, the two men turned feminism into a source of amusement by impersonating feminists both real and ­imagined.122 Such joking correspondence, brushing off the feminists with a wink and a nod, remained firmly within the private sphere of friendship. The public response by other male sociobiologists to feminist criticism amounted to a condescending “sorry, girls, but it’s true—­mother nature herself is a sexist.”123 Such a reply was more of a shrug, a sigh, than an irate rebuttal. Although it was more power­ful and potentially more damaging to sociobiology, the charge of sexism did not sting ­these men in the same way that the charge of racism did. The difference supported Ruth Hubbard’s observation that “the routinely jocular dismissal of charges of misogyny brings to mind Kate Millett’s remark that ‘sexism (unlike most other systems of oppression) is pleased with itself.’ ”124 257

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At the same time, the feminist critique was also marginalized by the male critics of sociobiology, its perspectives left out of anthologies and its proponents made to feel unwelcome in the SSG. Thus, while Wilson pulled together with the pop ethologists, making common cause with Tiger and Ardrey and presenting a unified front against their opposition, the critics split. As SSG members set themselves apart from the International Committee Against Racism at the notorious water-­dousing episode, the feminist members of the SSG, like Hubbard, left the group to establish their own alternative forum. Even though the SSG had incorporated feminist perspectives into its critiques, the feminists felt that the charge of sexism was never paramount but always a subset of the broader indictment of sociobiology’s biological determinism. The feminists could be not satisfied by what they considered a token acknowledgement. Such schisms among the critics made them look divided, especially when they quarreled with each other, and prob­ably weakened the force of their criticism. The Genes and Gender Collective continued to meet throughout the 1980s. At each GGC meeting, the organizers stressed that although the talks criticized other branches of biology as well, the collective’s main goal remained, as always, to defeat sociobiology.125 In 1983, the collective hosted a conference on ge­ne­tic determinism and ­women’s health, at which Ethel Tobach presented a definitive critique of Wilson’s sociobiology.126 In 1984 Tobach or­ga­nized a symposium at the Eastern Psychological Association on “evolutionary pro­cesses and the violent abuse of w ­ omen by men,” demolishing claims by the sociobiologist Randy Thornhill that rape was an evolved “alternative reproductive strategy.”127 In presenting an or­ga­nized forum for feminist critique, the Genes and Gender Collective represented something definitively new in the landscape of debates about the sciences of h ­ uman nature, a significant ­development that set the sociobiology debate apart from the aggression debate. Its marginalization, however, both by the sociobiologists and by their male critics, ­limited the impact of the GGC’s challenge. Had Hubbard’s charge of sexism been attended to more consistently by the male critics—­and had Wilson and other sociobiologists been forced to answer it more robustly—­the sociobiology debate might have taken a dif­fer­ent course. Instead of allowing Wilson to make a blanket denial of “biological determinism,” he and other sociobiologists would have had to justify the sexism that was indeed a blatant and significant feature of much sociobiology. The SSG itself had acknowledged that the sexism of sociobiology indicated its “politics aplenty.” In many ways, the charge of 258

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sexism was the critics’ strongest suit, and they could have played it more effectively. Instead of repeating the charges of biological determinism and extreme environmentalism—­nature versus nurture—­a debate more focused on the feminist critiques might have brought out certain inconsistencies in sociobiological reasoning. For example, the sociobiologists insisted on dif­fer­ent essential natures for males and females, while other­wise they seemed solidly in ­favor of unifying ­human nature. Why bifurcate ­human nature by gender, while at the same time refusing to bifurcate it by race or in any other way? What made gender difference so dif­fer­ent from racial difference? The feminist critique might also have forced socio­ biologists to justify the limits of their essentialism. Why in some cases did they invoke links between the ge­ne­tic or cellular level and the behavioral level and in other cases did not? Wilson, for example, denied that competition at the allelic level automatically translated into competition at the behavioral level; yet, when speaking of eggs and sperm, he was convinced that the differential energy parents invested in offspring was a direct result of the size of their gametes. Hubbard’s anti-­positivist, social constructivist perspective would have prevented both sociobiologists and their critics from resorting to an unproblematic appeal to the “facts” and would have forced each side to explain why its linkage of fact and value was superior to the other. With the feminist perspective often relegated to secondary or subsidiary status, the SSG tended to borrow from the same playbook that Montagu had used against the pop ethologists, and the debate assumed the familiar nature versus nurture opposition. But this pattern was far from foreordained. The SSG could prob­ably have broken away from it by a more consistent and thorough inclusion of the feminist critique, which approached sociobiology and the other sciences of h ­ uman nature in ways utterly foreign to Montagu’s thinking. But to the extent that the SSG sidelined the feminists, their critique was doomed to repeat the old tropes and rehearse the old pattern. The SSG’s own sexism had blocked a v­ iable means of escape.

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CONCLUSION

On the Shores of Lake Turkana

T

his book has charted the rise and transformation of the popu­lar science of ­human nature over a period of fifty years. In the 1930s and 1940s, Konrad Lorenz envisioned a science of animal be­hav­ior in the wild with the theory of instinct at its core. In the 1950s he became fascinated by the instinct of aggression, convinced that it was as power­ful in ­humans as it was in animals, and he introduced his conviction to broad audiences in popu­lar books. At the same time, Ashley Montagu became equally convinced that cooperation, mutual aid, and love ­were the key drives of animate nature, as evident in the lives of cells and animals as in ­human beings. By the 1950s, Montagu—­wildly successful as a public intellectual—­was also reaching well beyond professional scientific audiences. ­These twin conceptions—­opposite in their view of humanity—­ developed at the same time and in parallel. Each recruited further proponents and allies during the 1950s and early 1960s. The aggressionist side was bolstered by Robert Ardrey, who borrowed Raymond Dart’s conception of the bloodthirsty Australopithecus and made it the centerpiece of his pop ethology, and by Anthony Storr, who explored the psychological implications of an aggression instinct. Meanwhile Montagu’s brief for love gained support from the maverick sociologist Pitirim Sorokin and from the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, both of whom believed that the highest and finest capacities of ­human nature ­were rooted in biology. I call the tradition to which all ­these men belonged the popu­lar science of ­human nature. That tradition remained strong for thirty years, from the 1930s to the early 1960s, ­because it was composed of a braid of three threads. Three central themes, three common assumptions, bound both sides together despite the fact that they disagreed on the general orientation of h ­ uman nature. The first of t­ hese threads was a shared conviction that h ­ uman nature had a biological basis. H ­ uman beings w ­ ere not 260

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blank slates, formed wholly by environment or culture; ­human society could not be s­ haped or turned in any direction one wished. Instead, ­human nature possessed deep and abiding biological tendencies, stemming from evolutionary ancestry and reflected throughout the natu­ral world. T ­ hese innate instincts or drives would invariably assert themselves in be­hav­ior; efforts to expunge them w ­ ere in vain; and society must adapt to them or suffer the consequences. For Lorenz, an improperly discharged aggression instinct could trigger nuclear Armageddon; for Montagu, men as well as nations would fall ill if deprived of the urge to cooperate. I have argued that the conviction that h ­ uman nature was biologically grounded arose in the context of World War II as an antidote to fascism and gained significance during the Cold War as a means of proving the artificiality of communism. In t­ hese historical contexts, conditioning of h ­ uman be­ hav­ior by totalitarian authority posed an existential threat—­a threat that ­these writers combatted by asserting that demo­cratic social order was “natu­ral” for ­human beings. The second thread binding together aggressionists and cooperationists was a belief in the power and importance of popu­lar science. I have used the term “popu­lar” to imply a science that not only reaches broad lay audiences but that also aims to empower the p ­ eople, to grant them the capacity to become knowledge producers, not just consumers—to flip the traditional hierarchy of expertise. I have argued that Lorenzian ethology was popu­lar in exactly this sense: his science, conducted in domestic spaces, recruited laypeople to the practice of animal-­watching and gave amateurs a central and respected position. Ardrey’s amateur status was on proud display in all his books, which made a thoroughgoing critique of hyperspecialized elite scientists. Ardrey’s critique was shared by Montagu, Sorokin, and Maslow, each of whom rebelled against professional narrowness and insistence on objectivity. Montagu left academia at the midpoint of his ­career to write for and speak to public audiences. Sorokin established an alternative acad­emy outside of mainstream social science, at Harvard’s margins, to pursue his unconventional science of amitology. Maslow believed that love for the object of study was crucial to but largely missing from scientific approaches to h ­ uman nature. For the defenders of love and cooperation, as for the advocates of a killer instinct, a new kind of science was necessary to encompass ­human nature: a science accessible to and practiced by the ­people, unconstrained by academic strictures, in which sympathy and identification between knower and known became recognized as valid scientific methods. 261

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The third thread linking ­these other­wise opposed visions of ­human nature was gender. Theirs was a science of “man,” a term they used unproblematically to mean “­human,” but which also referred only to the male of the species. For all of t­ hese theorists of “­human” nature, gender difference was the absolutely bedrock assumption, often so obvious as to hardly need stating. Montagu made the assumption explicit in his 1953 Natu­ral Superiority of ­Women: w ­ omen w ­ ere essentially—­biologically and psychologically—­dif­fer­ent from men, more naturally loving and nurturing. At the very moment at which Montagu was seeking to unify h ­ uman beings across racial categories, he was bifurcating humanity by gender. Lorenz, Ardrey, and Storr similarly divided male from female nature, even while delineating a common ­human nature. Aggression, especially the constructive type of aggression that interested the pop ethologists, was a male trait; only males enacted the assertive and searching kind of be­ hav­ior that when properly sublimated created social bonds. It was the male Australopithecus that picked up the weapon, the male greylag that redirected and ritualized the attack. Female aggression, when it occurred (for Montagu it was almost unthinkable) was always reactive and defensive, not creative. Over time, however, one by one, each of the threads binding the ­human nature tradition together was weakened and cut. The braid began to unravel in 1966, the year that Lorenz’s On Aggression and Ardrey’s Ter­ ritorial Imperative ­were published and became best sellers. Montagu immediately rebutted their claim for a killer instinct by assembling volumes of critical reviews, and a fierce and protracted debate ensued, each side matching the other step by step and book for book. That debate severed the first thread of the shared tradition: the belief that h ­ uman nature was biologically based. I have argued that Montagu ­stopped advocating for a cooperative drive and openly argued against ­human instincts. As a result of this tactic—­and the aggressionists’ consistent caricaturing of their key opponent as an “environmentalist”—­the debate took on the polarized form of nature versus nurture. To the extent that Montagu castigated Ardrey for being unscientific, for lacking proper credentials, and for not observing the canons of scientific method, the second thread—­the devotion to popu­lar science—­was weakened as well. The pop ethologists’ feminist critics attacked the third thread—­the devotion to gender difference; though for Montagu and the contributors to his anthologies, the gendered claims of the aggressionists ­were not at issue.

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The debate between Lorenz, Ardrey and the aggressionists, on the one hand, and Montagu and his allies, on the other, changed both sides. Their interactions drove them apart; they forgot or abandoned their once shared assumptions and took up polarized positions. By the end of the 1960s, the h ­ uman nature tradition as it had existed just a few years before was no more: it had imploded from within. Biologically based and po­ liti­cally liberal, the popu­lar science once practiced by Lorenz, Ardrey, and Montagu, and capacious enough to embrace them all, had come undone: the latent tensions that that tradition once readily contained had now broken it apart. In place of the shared tradition, an intransigent opposition arose between believers in ­human nature, now coded as reactionaries and conservatives, and ­those who supposedly believed only in the power of nurture and who ­were tarred with the brush of communism. In the midst of this face-­off, and in reaction to it, E. O. Wilson conceived of sociobiology. In a series of increasingly ambitious publications from 1969 to 1978, Wilson constructed a science of animal and ­human be­ hav­ior that was intended to rise above the polarized oppositions of the aggression debate, to chart a ­middle way between nature and nurture. His 1975 blockbuster Sociobiology rejected the Lorenzian concept of instinct and analyzed both animal and ­human be­hav­ior at the ge­ne­tic level instead, thus giving the idea of the biological basis of be­hav­ior—­a mainstay of the old h ­ uman nature tradition—an entirely new meaning. Yet in his insistence on innate aggression as a feature of h ­ uman be­hav­ior, Wilson drew much closer to Lorenzian ethology than he ever came to Montagu’s alternative. Wilson picked up on the second thread of the h ­ uman nature tradition as well—­the devotion to popu­lar science—­but ­here too he used it to distinguish sociobiology from pop ethology. In contrast to the cele­bration of amateurs and of subjectivity evident in Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s writings, Wilson envisioned sociobiology as a dif­fer­ent kind of popu­lar science, reliant on scientific method, not unaided intuition; on objectivity, not advocacy; on neutrality, not po­liti­cal engagement; and, above all, on trained professionals as creators and transmitters of knowledge, not laypeople. I have argued that a key distinction between Wilson’s sociobiology and its pre­de­ces­sor sciences of h ­ uman nature was in its attitude t­ oward and practice of popularization. The third thread originally tying together the h ­ uman nature tradition did not become an issue u ­ ntil the debate over sociobiology broke out

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in 1975. The assumption of gender difference was not at stake in the debate between Montagu and the aggressionists; that assumption remained implicit and unquestioned, while their debate focused on the biological basis of ­human nature and the purposes of popu­lar science. But by 1975, the sexism of the sciences of ­human nature came to the fore, first in the criticisms of Wilson’s sociobiology made by the Sociobiology Study Group, and even more strongly by Ruth Hubbard and the feminist critics of the Genes and Gender Collective. I have argued that the sociobiology debate took the same form as the aggression debate—an oppositional standoff between extreme positions, nature versus nurture—­despite Wilson’s attempts to transcend it. Nonetheless, the feminist critique represented something new in the landscape of debate. By seizing on this most basic assumption—­ belief in biologically determined gender difference—­and making it a central issue in the debate, the feminists cut the final thread of the h ­ uman nature tradition. In the course of t­ hese interlinked debates, and b ­ ecause of them, the concept of h ­ uman nature itself underwent a marked shift. In the 1950s, the idea of h ­ uman nature with its roots in biology was a bulwark of liberalism, a defense against totalitarian authority and a brief for the rights of the individual. By the 1970s, however, the concept of a universal h ­ uman nature had been coded conservative, tied by its critics to the support of the status quo and considered a roadblock to any social change. A moderate liberal like Montagu, who had once championed the concept of ­human nature to support his liberal beliefs, now fled from it. For the duration of the aggression debate, Montagu relinquished his hold on the concept and his right to define it and ceded it to his opponents. By the time the sociobiology debate got u ­ nder way in 1975, the left-­wing and Marxist critics of sociobiology wanted nothing to do with the concept of ­human nature: to them it was not universal and unifying but blind to diversity and multiculturalism and, as such, an apt symbol of racism, sexism, and classism. In a few short de­cades the concept had shifted its po­liti­cal valence. Its conservative po­liti­cal associations became so entrenched—in part ­because its critics made them seem so obvious—­that its e­ arlier liberalism was almost completely forgotten.1 In an indication of how far the concept of h ­ uman nature has traveled from its classically liberal origins, one critic of popu­lar evolutionary psy­chol­ogy—­heir to the legacy of pop ethology and sociobiology—­calls it “neo-­liberal ge­ne­tics.”2 Far from the defense of universalistic h ­ uman values it had once represented, the sci-

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ence of ­human nature is now considered (at least by its critics) as an apology for free-­market capitalism. A history of debates about the popu­lar science of ­human nature is as much about the shifting fortunes of po­liti­cal liberalism as it is about the science itself.

d ­ ecause polarization rather than consensus was their legacy, the debates B I have discussed in this book never reached any sort of definitive closure. They did not produce a “winner.” Lorenz’s 1973 Nobel Prize, Wilson’s 1977 National Medal of Science and 1979 Pulitzer Prize failed to silence their critics. Montagu’s popu­lar writings continued unabated. Although he was forced during the aggression debate into the “environmentalist” corner, once outside the realm of that debate, and a­ fter it had waned, he resumed speaking of innate needs, particularly the need for loving touch, which he believed essential to becoming a fully functional ­human being.3 He became a critic of sociobiology, which he believed bore striking similarities to pop ethology.4 Sociobiology’s other critics remained out­spoken too. In 1984, Richard Lewontin, in collaboration with Leon Kamin and Steven Rose, published Not in Our Genes, a ­wholesale critique of ge­ne­tic reductionism in biology, including sociobiology.5 Ethel Tobach presented trenchant criticisms of sociobiology at Genes and Gender Collective conferences in the 1980s. Ruth Hubbard broadened her opposition to gender essentialism to encompass a critique of the widespread and regular use of prenatal technologies, which she excoriated as a “new eugenics.” 6 Yet, in 1986, the claim for a killer instinct was still considered so pervasive and power­ful that a group of scientists (some of whom w ­ ere veterans of the aggression and sociobiology debates) felt compelled to issue a declaration denying the claim for innate aggression. “IT IS SCIENTIFICALLY INCORRECT to say,” the Seville Statement on Vio­lence asserted, “that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors.”7 In recent de­cades, the popu­lar sciences of ­human nature have continued to morph and evolve, drawing in new evidence and emphases while reverberating with old themes. Evolutionary psy­chol­ogy moved beyond sociobiology’s focus on social be­hav­ior to explore the ways in which the modules of the mind—­our common ­human ways of thinking—­were ­shaped by evolution. Yet when a rancorous debate unfolded about the theories

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and assumptions of the new science, its proponents deployed the nature versus nurture dichotomy as a battering ram just as effectively as their pre­de­ces­sors had in the aggression and sociobiology debates. Meanwhile, popu­lar primatology—in the work of Frans de Waal and Richard Wrangham—­held up studies of ape be­hav­ior as a mirror of ­humans’ own, promising us insight into who we ­really are. Their writings hinted at the continuing appeal of the genre of the popu­lar science of ­human nature, even if they lacked the same po­liti­cal and populist import of e­ arlier incarnations of that genre. Wrangham argued that or­ga­nized chimpanzee vio­lence provides an explanation of the h ­ uman penchant for warfare, showing that Lorenz and Ardrey ­were wrong to believe that ­humans ­were the only animals that deliberately killed members of their own species.8 De Waal offered a glimpse into our “inner ape” by studying peacemaking and lovemaking bonobos, pointing out that too much emphasis has been placed on the aggressive side of ­human nature.9 His approach hearkened back to the cooperationist tradition that had been thrust into eclipse by the polemical nature-­versus-­nurture framing of the mid-­twentieth-­century h ­ uman nature debates. By looking at dif­fer­ent ape species, the two scientists came up with contrasting visions of ­human nature, but they insisted that their views w ­ ere complementary and not contradictory. Wrangham and De Waal, what­ever their differences, agreed that ape be­hav­ior was indeed relevant for understanding ­human be­hav­ior and ­human society. But if the history of debates about ­human nature have taught us anything, it’s that we should not expect consensus. Does the key to the prob­lem of h ­ uman vio­lence lie in our biology? In seeking to understand h ­ uman aggression, should we be searching in the depths of h ­ uman prehistory and the be­hav­ior of our animal relations? The question has lost none of its enduring fascination. In 2016, on what was once the shore of a lagoon on Lake Turkana in ­Kenya, archaeologists made a startling discovery: a dozen prehistoric h ­ uman skele­tons, the ten-­ thousand-­year-­old remains of our hunter-­gatherer ancestors, that appeared to have been victims of a massacre. Ten of the twelve skele­tons showed unmistakable signs of violent death: their skulls had been crushed and arrow points ­were embedded in their bones. One man had been speared in the head; a pregnant w ­ oman had been tied up before she was killed. ­There was no evidence of deliberate burials. One group of hunter-­ gatherers had evidently attacked and slaughtered another.10 The find made the pages of the New York Times, which reported that it showed the antiquity of ­human vio­lence and perhaps, even before the 266

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advent of agriculture, of or­ga­nized warfare.11 The Times editorial page weighed in.12 “The discovery is certain to stir up a debate about h ­ uman nature” that pitted Hobbes against Rousseau, and that in fact “goes all the way back to Adam and Eve”: Are ­humans inherently peaceful, or does war have deep biological roots? “The deaths . . . ​are testimony,” the Times opined, quoting the scientists, “to the antiquity of inter-­group vio­lence and war”—­a conclusion that would have delighted Ardrey. But if it was part of our past, must vio­lence be inevitable in our ­future as well? The Times’ answer was more circumspect: “A propensity for vio­lence, even if it is innate, has been more than matched throughout our existence by a preference for peace”—­a concession that might have mollified Montagu. Our biology, ­after all, might not be our destiny. As a piece of popu­lar science, the editorial made claims like t­ hose I have discussed in this book. The Times did more than just weigh the evidence, a collection of bones. It told a compelling story of biblical proportions about the origins of evil. It moved from the specific Lake Turkana find to a universal claim about humanity. And, by considering what implications the discovery held for the h ­ uman ­future, the editorial turned from description to prescription. In making ­these deft moves—­from evidence to story, from par­tic­ul­ar to universal, from descriptive to normative—­the Times editorial did what all popu­lar science of ­human nature aims to do: to peer into the depths of the ­human heart, to tell us not only what we are, but what we can and must become. ­Because it confronts the ultimate mystery of our nature, the popu­lar science of ­human nature must always remain inconclusive. Yet even as the genre stretches the limits of scientific knowledge, it claims the status of that knowledge. It is for that reason, I have argued, that its claims deserve our scrutiny.

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NOTES

Introduction Epigraph: Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 46. 1. E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000 [1975]), and On ­Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 [1976]); Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of ­Human Nature (New York: Vintage, 2002); David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash, Madame Bovary’s Ova­ ries: A Darwinian Look at Lit­er­a­ture (New York: Delacorte Press, 2005). 2. On the meta­phor of the “beast within,” see John Klama, Aggression: The Myth of the Beast Within (New York: Wiley, 1988).

3. Wilson, On ­Human Nature, p. 99.

4. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio­lence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), p. 483. In Blank Slate, Pinker calls vio­lence “part of our design” (p. 314). Although both Wilson and Pinker reject the idea of an “aggression instinct”—­the concept central to Lorenzian ethology—­they both treat vio­lence and aggression as key to ­human nature, ­human nature as “fixed” by evolutionary pressures, and the alternative theories as “purely environmental” (Pinker, Blank Slate, p. 312). 5. Many of t­ hese claims w ­ ere pop­ul­ar­ized by Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psy­chol­ogy (New York: Vintage, 1994). On the debate over w ­ hether aggression and vio­lence are “hardwired” in h ­ umans, see David Barash, “Are We Hard-­Wired for War?” New York Times, September 28, 2013, as well as Barash’s articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Evolution, Males, and Vio­lence” (May 24, 2002); “The Ugly Underside of Altruism (June 29, 2001); “The Targets of Aggression” (October  5, 2007). On the naturalness of rape, see Craig  T. Palmer and ral History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion Randy Thornhill, A Natu­

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(­ Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). On “Us versus Them,” see Robert Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of ­Humans at Our Best and Worst (London: Penguin, 2017). 6. Bill Gates called Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now “my new favorite book of all time” (GatesNotes: The Blog of Bill Gates, January  26, 2018, https://­www​.­gatesnotes​ .­com​/ ­books​/­enlightenment​-­now), followed by Pinker’s Better Angels; see also Philip Galanes, “The Mind Meld of Bill Gates and Steven Pinker,” New York Times, January 27, 2018. Bob Lalasz noted Pinker’s cele­bration by Bill Gates and the New York Times ­columnist David Brooks in “Authority vs. Expertise; Or, Why Steven Pinker Is Winning,” ­January 16, 2019 (https://­medium​.­com​/­science​-­plus​-­story​/­why​-­steven​-­pinker​-­is​-­winning​ -­3355​f544​d0cf ). The casual ethology and sociobiology that pervade our mass media testify to the continuing appeal of the genre; for one recent example, see Peter Collett, “The Seven ­Faces of Donald Trump: A Psychologist’s View,” The Guardian, January  15, 2017 (https://­www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­us​-­news​/­2017​/­jan​/­15​/­the​-­seven​-­faces​-­of​-­donald​-­trump​ -­a​-­psychologists​-­view). 7. Critiques of evolutionary psy­chol­ogy include Elisabeth  A. Lloyd, “Science Gone Astray: Evolution and Rape,” Michigan Law Review 99, no. 6 (2001): 1536–1559, and Lloyd, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Susan McKinnon, Neo-­Liberal Ge­ne­tics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psy­chol­ogy (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2005); and Richard J. ­ eople: The Misuse and Abuse of Science Perry, Killer Apes, Naked Apes, and Just Plain Nasty P in Po­liti­cal Discourse (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). For critiques of the historical assumptions of Pinker’s Better Angels, see Steve Fuller, “Book Review: The Better Angels of Our Nature,” So­cio­log­i­cal Review 60, no. 3 (2012): 566–570; and a special issue of Historical Reflections 44, no. 1 (2018). 8. My analy­sis of persuasive strategies in science has been informed by Leah Ceccarelli, Shaping Science with Rhe­toric: The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schrödinger, and Wilson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Stephen Hilgartner, Science on Stage: Expert Ad­ vice as Public Drama (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Greg Myers, Writing Biology: Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 9. The popu­lar books that made this claim include Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring: New Light on Animal Ways (New York: Harper and Row, 1952), and Lorenz, On Ag­ gression (originally published as Das Sogennante Böse: Zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression [Vienna: Borotha-­Schoeler, 1963]); Robert Ardrey, African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man (New York: Atheneum, 1961); Ardrey, Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (New York: Atheneum, 1966); Ardrey, The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder (New York: Atheneum, 1970); and Ardrey, The Hunting Hy­ pothesis: A Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man (New York: Atheneum, 1976); Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the ­Human An­ 270

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imal (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967); Anthony Storr, ­Human Aggression (New York: Penguin, 1968); Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, The Imperial Animal (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971). 10. On the history of the concept of aggression in animal and h ­ uman sciences, see John Durant, “The Beast in Man: A Historical Perspective on the Biology of H ­ uman Aggression,” in The Biology of ­Human Aggression, ed. P. F. Brain and D. Benton (Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff and Noordhoff, 1981), pp. 17–46; Richard W. Burkhardt Jr., “The Found­ers of Ethology and the Prob­lem of ­Human Aggression: A Study in Ethology’s Ecologies,” in The Animal / ­Human Boundary, ed. Angela N. H. Creager and William Chester Jordans (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), pp. 265–304; Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Annukka Sailo, Hierarchies, Population Control, War: Debating Territorial Aggression in Behavioral Sciences, 1965–1975 (PhD diss., University of Oulu, 2020); and Sailo, “Contesting the ‘Territorial Aggression Thesis’ in Environmental Psy­ chol­ogy, ca. 1965–1980,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (2018): 1–17 (doi:10.1002 / jhbs.21910). The most thorough and detailed analy­sis of the rise and fall of the “killer ape” theory is Erika Lorraine Milam’s Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for ­Human Nature in Cold War Amer­i­ca (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2019). Milam takes a diachronic view in which the progressive evolutionist consensus of the 1950s, which emphasized ­human cooperation, was disrupted and replaced in the mid-1960s by the killer ape thesis. The killer ape in turn met its demise at the hands of E. O. Wilson’s sociobiology and Jane Goodall’s primatology. The view I take ­here is a more synchronic one. I focus on the interaction from 1966 to 1976 between the aggressionists, mainly Lorenz and Ardrey, and the cooperationists, mainly Montagu. I interpret their interaction as a decade-­long debate between two rival visions of ­human nature, equally biologically based but other­wise opposed, a debate that ­shaped and changed both sides and out of which, and in reaction to which, sociobiology emerged. Milam shows that evolutionary conceptions of h ­ uman nature ­were attacked in the 1970s from two directions: new left scientists on the one hand, especially cultural anthropologists, and new right conservatives and evangelicals on the other. I aim to show ­here that biological conceptions of ­human nature imploded from within: the ­human nature tradition, once capacious enough to contain such diverse representatives as Lorenz, Ardrey, and Montagu, got split apart in the mid-1960s u ­ nder the pressure of the aggression debate, into an opposition between “nature” and “nurture.” Milam’s interpretation and my own are not, therefore, contradictory but complementary. 11. On the history of ethology, see Richard W. Burkhardt Jr., Patterns of Be­hav­ior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Marga Vicedo, The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to At­ tachment in Cold War Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Tania Munz, The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). On the history of the sciences of animal be­hav­ior, see Robert Boakes, From Darwin to Behaviorism: Psy­chol­ogy and the Minds of Animals 271

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(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Donald Dewsbury, Comparative Psy­ chol­ogy in the Twentieth C ­ entury (Stroudburg: Hutchinson Ross, 1984); Gregory Radick, The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds., Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

12. Lorenz, Das Sogennante Böse.

13. The pop ethologists capitalized on the rapid increase in scientific book publishing in the post–­World War II era; see Bruce Lewenstein, “Science Books since 1945,” in The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar Amer­ic­ a, ed. David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 347– 360. See also Melinda Gormley, “Pulp Science: Education and Communication in the ­Paperback Book Revolution,” Endeavour 40 (2016): 24–37. 14. See Robert Poole, “2001: A Space Odyssey and the ‘Dawn of Man,’ ” in Stanley Ku­ brick: New Perspectives, ed. Tatjana Ljujić, Peter Krämer, and Richard Daniels (London: Black Dog, 2015), pp. 174–197.

15. I owe this formulation to a conversation years ago with Peter Dear.

16. As historians and sociologists have shown, it is of course pos­si­ble for debates even in the hard sciences to be reopened. Classic treatment of knowledge making and debate closure in the sciences include Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­ Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1985); Bruno Latour, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1986); Peter Galison, How Experiments End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). On the constructed boundary between science and pseudoscience, see Michael D. Gordin, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 17. I agree with Sigrid Schmalzer on the usefulness of the concept of “popu­lar science,” despite criticisms it has received; see Schmalzer, “Popu­lar Science, A Useful and Productive Category ­After All,” Historical Studies in the Natu­ral Sciences 42, no. 5 (2012): 590–600. See also critiques by James Secord, “Knowledge in Transit,” Isis 95, no. 4 (2004): 654–672, and by Jonathan Topham, “Introduction” (Focus: Historicizing “Popu­lar Science”) Isis 100 (2009): 310–318. My approach to popu­lar science draws on Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey, “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popu­lar Culture,” History of Science 32 (1994): 237– 267; Stephen Hilgartner, “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Prob­lems, Po­liti­cal Uses,” Social Studies of Science 20, no.  3 (1990): 519–539; Katherine Pandora, “Knowledge Held in Common: Tales of Luther Burbank and Science in the American Vernacular,” Isis 92 (2001): 484–516; Sigrid Schmalzer, The ­People’s Peking Man: Popu­lar Sci­ ence and H ­ uman Identity in Twentieth C ­ entury China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and “Focus: Historicizing ‘Popu­lar Science,’ ” Isis 100 (2009): 310–368. On 272

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the coproduction of popu­lar and elite ways of knowing, see Michael Pettit, “The ‘Joy in Believing’: The Cardiff G ­ iant, Commercial Deceptions, and Styles of Observation in Gilded Age Amer­i­ca,” Isis 97 (2006): 659–677. 18. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), part 1, chapter 13 (https://­www​.­gutenberg​.­org​ /­files​/­3207​/­3207​-­h​/­3207​-­h​.­htm). 19. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Se­lection in Relation to Sex (2nd ed., London: John Murray, 1879) (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 155. On the history of Darwinian ideas of ­mental, moral, and social evolution, see Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Be­hav­ior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 20. Thomas Henry Huxley, “Evolution and Ethics” (1893), in Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943, T. H. Huxley and Julian Huxley (London: Pi­lot Press, 1947), pp. 33–102. 21. William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1910), in William James: Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca), pp. 1281–1293. 22. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), translated and edited by James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), p. 69. Freud had first introduced the notion of the death drive in 1920 in Beyond the Plea­sure Princi­ple (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). 23. Karl Menninger, with the collaboration of Jeanetta Lyle Menninger, Love against Hate (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), p. 129. 24. John Dollard, Neal E. Miller, Leonard W. Doob, O. H. Mowrer, and Robert Sears, Frustration and Aggression (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939), p.  26. On the Yale Institute of ­Human Relations, see J.  G. Morawski, “Organ­izing Knowledge and Be­ hav­ior at Yale’s Institute of H ­ uman Relations,” Isis 77, no. 2 (1986): 219–242; and Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005). 25. See, for example, John Paul Scott, Aggression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Arnold H. Buss, The Psy­chol­ogy of Aggression (New York: Wiley, 1961); Leonard Berkowitz, Aggression: A Social Psychological Analy­sis (New York: McGraw Hill, 1962); Albert Bandura, Aggression: A Social Learning Analy­sis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973). 26. Among ­those who ­were critical of the Lorenz-­Ardrey thesis of an aggression instinct, but nonetheless felt it necessary to mention it, if only to refute it, ­were Hannah Arendt, On Vio­lence (New York: Harvest, 1970), pp.  59–66; Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of ­Human Destructiveness (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1973), pp. 37–54; and Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), pp. 165–166. 27. On popu­lar science as mass science (though in a very dif­fer­ent context), see Schmalzer, ­People’s Peking Man. I locate Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s books within a broader 273

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critique of science during the 1960s; see Andrew Jewett, Science U ­ nder Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); Jon Agar, “What Happened in the Sixties?” British Journal of the History of Science 41 (2008): 567–600; and Everett Mendelsohn, “The Politics of Pessimism: Science and Technology circa 1968,” in Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism, ed. Yaron Ezrahi, Everett Mendelsohn, and Howard Segal (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1994), pp.  151–173. See also Bruce V. Lewenstein, “The Meaning of the ‘Public Understanding of Science’ in the United States ­after World War II,” Public Understanding of Science 1, no. 1 (2016): 45–68. 28. For a similar strategy employed by the proponents of cognitive science during the same period, see Jamie Cohen-­Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of ­Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). On the po­liti­cal meanings of science during the Cold War see, Audra Wolfe, Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Strug­gle for the Soul of Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). 29. See Susan Sperling, “Ashley Montagu, 1905–1999,” American Anthropologist 102, no. 3 (2000): 583–588. 30. For Montagu’s vari­ous expressions of t­ hese ideas throughout his c­ areer, see Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942); On Being H ­ uman (New York: Schuman, 1950); The H ­ uman Revolution (New York: Bantam, 1965); Touching: The ­Human Significance of the Skin (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); The Nature of ­Human Aggression (New York: Oxford, 1976). 31. Pitirim Sorokin, Altruistic Love: A Study of American “Good Neighbors” and Chris­ tian Saints (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950). 32. See Montagu, “The Natu­ral Superiority of ­Women,” Saturday Review 35 (March 1, 1952): 9, 26–29.

33. See, for example, Ardrey, Territorial Imperative, pp. 29–31.

34. For examples of t­ hese portrayals, see Ardrey, Territorial Imperative, pp. 20–21, and Leon Eisenberg, “The ­Human Nature of H ­ uman Nature,” in Man and Aggression, ed. Ashley Montagu, 1st ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 53–69 (pp. 57–58). 35. M. F. Ashley Montagu, “The New Litany of ‘Innate Depravity,’ or Original Sin Revisited,” in Man and Aggression, pp. 3–17 (p. 9). 36. On the history of nature versus nurture, see Diane B. Paul, The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature Nurture Debate (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Hamilton Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution: American Scien­ tists and the Heredity-­Environment Controversy, 1900–1941 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978); Vicedo, Nature and Nurture; Anne C. Rose, “William McDougall, American Psychologist: A Reconsideration of Nature-­Nurture Debates in the Interwar United States,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 52, no.  4 (2016): 325–348. On Francis Galton, coiner of the phrase “nature versus nurture,” see Raymond E. 274

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Fancher, Pioneers of Psy­chol­ogy (New York: Norton, 1996); Nicholas Wright Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics (New York: Oxford, 2001). 37. For philosophical and scientific criticisms of the nature versus nurture dichotomy, see Evelyn Fox Keller, The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); James Tabery, Beyond Versus: The Strug­gle to Understand the Interaction of Nature and Nurture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014); and Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Ge­ne­tic, Epige­ne­tic, Behavioral, and Sym­ bolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA: Bradford, 2014). Helen Longino argues that “per­sis­tent interest” in the nature-­nurture dichotomy features in behavioral science research about aggression; see Longino, Studying ­Human Be­hav­ior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 38. Wilson, Sociobiology. On the history of the sociobiology debate, see Ullica Seger­ attle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond stråle, Defenders of the Truth: The B (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Segerstråle argues that Wilson’s sociobiology was a response to pop ethology (pp. 94–97). In Creatures of Cain, Milam argues that sociobiology repudiated the “colloquial science” of pop ethology and its devotion to the killer ape, yet its critics saw ­little distinction between the sciences (pp. 232–233) and treated them (and the debates over them) as continuous. I build on ­these insights to argue for a close historical connection between pop ethology and Wilson’s sociobiology.

39. Wilson, Sociobiology, pp. 28–29.

40. Elizabeth Allen, Barbara Beckwith, Jon Beckwith, Steven Chorover, and David Culver et al., “Against ‘Sociobiology,’ ” New York Review of Books, November 13, 1975. 41. Wilson’s sociobiological writings include “Competitive and Aggressive Be­hav­ior,” in Man and Beast: Comparative Social Be­hav­ior, ed. J.  F. Eisenberg and Wilton  S. Dillon (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971); The Insect Socie­ties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Sociobiology (1975); and On ­Human Nature (1978).

42. Wilson, “For Sociobiology,” New York Review of Books, December 15, 1975.

43. See the essays in Genes and Gender II: Pitfalls in Research on Sex and Gender, ed. Ruth Hubbard and Marian Lowe (New York: Gordian Press, 1979). 44. Lowe and Hubbard, “Sociobiology and Biosociology: Can Science Prove the Biological Basis of Sex Differences in Be­hav­ior?” in Genes and Gender II, pp. 91–112. 45. Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifin, and Barbara Fried, ­Women Look at Biology Looking at ­Women: A Collection of Feminist Critiques (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1979). 46. Pinker, Blank Slate, pp.  26–27. The term “standard social science model” was coined by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psy­chol­ogy and the Generation of Culture, ed. Jerome  H. 275

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Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 19–136, esp. pp. 23–31. Pinker’s version of the history of the social sciences was influenced by Carl N. Degler, In Search of ­Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Degler argues that in the 1960s the social sciences, which had hitherto been dominated by a “culturalist” framework, underwent a revival of interest in Darwinian evolutionary biology, thus bringing about a reconciliation between biology and culture. My interpretation differs from Degler’s in three ways: (1) the social sciences w ­ ere never wholly culturalist, as I make clear by discussing representatives of ­these sciences who ­wholeheartedly embraced biological explanations of ­human be­hav­ior; (2) their embrace of biology did not wait ­until the 1960s but was evident already during the early 1940s; (3) the “revival of Darwinism” in the 1960s in the form of ethology and sociobiology did not bring about the reconciliation between biology and culture that Degler celebrates, but created a polarized discourse that pitted “nature” against “nurture.” Pinker repeats Degler’s historical interpretation in “Why Nature and Nurture ­Won’t Go Away,” Daedalus 133, no. 4 (2004): 5–17. Critical reviews of Blank Slate include Robert J. Richards, “The Evolutionary War,” New York Times Book Review, October 13, 2002, and Louis Menand, “What Comes Naturally,” New Yorker, November 25, 2002, pp. 96–101. 47. Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), p. 227. On the revival of theories of mutual aid stemming from primatological research on bonobos, see Eric Michael Johnson, “Ariel Casts Out Caliban,” Times Higher Education, April  21, 2011, and Deborah  F. Weinstein, “The ‘Make Love, Not War’ Ape: Bonobos and Late Twentieth ­Century Explanations for War and Peace,” Endeavour 40 (2016): 256–267.

1. How Ethology Became Popu­lar Epigraph: Konrad Lorenz, “Companions as ­Factors in the Bird’s Environment: The Conspecific as the Eliciting F ­ actor for Social Behaviour Patterns” (1935), in Studies in Animal and ­Human Behaviour, vol. 1, trans. Robert Martin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 251. 1. Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring: New Light on Animal Ways, translated by Marjorie Kerr Wilson, illustrated by the author and with a foreword by Julian Huxley (New York: Harper and Row, 1952 [1949]), pp. 47–48. 2. Konrad Lorenz, Man Meets Dog, translated from the German, So kam der Mensch auf dem Hund (Vienna: Dr. Borotha Schoeler, 1949), by Marjorie Kerr Wilson (London: Methuen, 1954); illustrated by Annie Eisenmenger and the author. 3. Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring, pp. 1–2. As the historian Richard W. Burkhardt Jr. has explained, Lorenz characterized himself as a “farmer,” raising and breeding animals at his home, in contrast to his colleague and cofounder of ethology Niko Tinbergen, who was a 276

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“hunter,” preferring to stalk and observe animals in the wild. See Burkhardt, Patterns of Be­hav­ior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 10–11. 4. On the idea of domestic science, and science practiced outside conventional or professional spaces, see Katherine Pandora, “Knowledge Held in Common: Tales of Luther Burbank and Science in the American Vernacular,” Isis 92, no. 3 (2001): 484–516. See also Katherine Pandora and Karen  A. Rader, “Science in the Everyday World: Why Perspectives from the History of Science ­Matter,” Isis 99, no. 2 (2008): 350–364; Anne Secord, “Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth C ­ entury Lancashire,” History ­ omen and of Science 32 (1994): 269–315; Anne Shteir, “Botany in the Breakfast Room: W Early Nineteenth ­Century British Plant Study,” in Uneasy ­Careers and Intimate Lives: ­Women in Science, ed. Pnina G. Abir-­Am and Dorinda Outram (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp.  31–43; James Secord, “Newton in the Nursery: Tom Telescope and the Philosophy of Tops and Balls, 1761–1838,” History of Science 23 (1985): 127–151. On the ­family’s role in domestic science, see Deborah Coen, “A Lens of Many Facets: Science through a ­Family’s Eyes,” Isis 97, no. 3 (2006): 395–419; Robert E. Kohler, “From Farm and F ­ amily to C ­ areer Naturalist: The Apprenticeship of Vernon Bailey,” Isis 99, no. 1 (2008): 28–56; Sally G. Kohlstedt, “Parlors, Primers, and Public Schooling: Education for Science in 19th ­Century Amer­ic­ a,” Isis 81, no. 3 (1990): 425–445; and Debra Lindsay, “Intimate Inmates: Wives, House­hold and Science in 19th ­Century Amer­i­ca,” Isis 89, no. 4 (1998): 631–652. 5. On Lorenz’s storytelling technique and admiration of amateurs, see John R. Durant, “Innate Character in Animals and Man: A Perspective on the Origins of Ethology,” in Biology, Medicine, and Society, 1840–1940, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 157–192. 6. On continuities across Lorenz’s c­ areer, see Burkhardt, Patterns of Be­hav­ior, especially chapters 6, 7, and 10; Marga Vicedo, “The F ­ ather of Ethology and the Foster M ­ other of Ducks: Konrad Lorenz as an Expert on Motherhood,” Isis 100, no.  2 (2009): 263–291; Vicedo, Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Tania Munz, “My Goose Child Martina,” Historical Studies in the Natu­ral Sciences 41, no. 4 (2011): 405–446. 7. On the application of ethology to ­human aggression, see Richard W. Burkhardt Jr., “The Found­ers of Ethology and the Prob­lem of H ­ uman Aggression: A Study in Ethology’s Ecologies,” in The Animal / ­Human Boundary, ed. Angela N. H. Creager and William Chester Jordans (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2002), pp. 265–304. 8. Biographical details are drawn from Burkhardt, Patterns of Be­hav­ior, pp.128–135; from Richard I. Evans, Konrad Lorenz: The Man and His Ideas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975); from Alec Nisbett, Konrad Lorenz (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976); and from Klaus Taschwer and Benedikt Föger, Konrad Lorenz: Biographie (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 2003). 277

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9. See Burkhardt, Patterns of Be­hav­ior: on Hochstetter, pp. 133–134; on Heinroth, pp. 136–140; on Bühler, p. 152.

10. Burkhardt, Patterns of Be­hav­ior, p. 176.

11. Lorenz, “Contributions to the Study of the Ethology of the Social Corvidae [Crows]” (1931); Lorenz, “A Consideration of Methods of Identification of Species-­Specific Instinctive Behaviour Patterns in Birds” (1932); Lorenz, “Companions as F ­ actors in the Bird’s Environment: The Conspecific as the Eliciting ­Factor for Social Behaviour Patterns” (1935). All three papers are included volume 1 of Lorenz, Studies in Animal and ­Human Behaviour, 2 vols., trans. Robert Martin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970–1971). On the reception of the “Companions” paper, see Burkhardt, Patterns of Be­hav­ior, p. 172.

12. Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior, pp. 205–208, 212, 484.



13. Lorenz, “Introduction,” in Studies, vol. 1, p. xvii.

14. Lorenz, “Animal Keeping as a Research Method,” chapter 15 in The Natu­ral Sci­ ence of the ­Human Species: An Introduction to Comparative Behavioral Research (The “Rus­ sian Manuscript,” 1944–1948), trans. Robert Martin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 221–232. 15. On the relationships between field and laboratory sciences, see Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-­Field Border in Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 16. Lorenz, “Taxis and Instinctive Behaviour Pattern in Egg Rolling by Greylag Goose” (1938), in Studies, vol. 1, pp. 316–350. 17. Lorenz tells the story of the black bathing suit in “Contributions” (1931), and again in “Consideration of Methods” (1932), both in Studies, vol. 1, pp. 8 and 98, respectively. He retells it in Natu­ral Science, p.  275, and, slightly differently, in King Solomon’s Ring, pp. 141–142. 18. Lorenz, “Comparative Method in Studying Innate Behaviour Patterns,” in Sym­ posia of the Society for Experimental Biology, No. 4: Physiological Mechanisms in Animal Be­ haviour (New York: Academic Press, 1950), p. 236. 19. On Lorenz’s theory of instinct, see Burkhardt, Patterns of Be­hav­ior, chapter 3; Ingo Brigandt, “The Instinct Concept of the Early Konrad Lorenz,” Journal of the History of Bi­ ology 38, no. 3 (2005): 571–608; Robert J. Richards, “The Innate and the Learned: The Evolution of Konrad Lorenz’s Theory of Instinct,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 4 (1974): 111–133; Theo  J. Kalikow, “History of Konrad Lorenz’s Ethological Theory, 1927–1939,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 6 (1975): 331–341; Kalikow, “Konrad Lorenz’s Ethological Theory, 1939–1943,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 6 (1976): 15–34; Kalikow, “Konrad Lorenz’s Ethological Theory, Explanation and Ideology, 1938–1943,” Journal of the History of Biology 16 (1983): 39–73. 278

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20. Lorenz, “Companions,” in Studies, vol. 1, p. 188.



21. Lorenz, “Companions,” in Studies, vol. 1, p. 157.



22. Lorenz, “Companions,” in Studies, vol. 1, p. 122.

23. Lorenz, “Consideration of Methods,” in Studies, vol. 1, p.  95. See also Lorenz, “Comparative Studies of the Motor Patterns of Anatinae,” in Studies, vol. 2, pp. 14–114. 24. Lorenz, “Comparative Method,” in Symposia, pp. 221–268 (pp. 237–238); Lorenz, “Psy­chol­ogy and Phylogeny,” in Studies, vol. 2, p. 201.

25. Lorenz, “Companions,” in Studies, vol. 1, p. 120.

26. On the features of instinctive be­hav­ior patterns, see Lorenz, “Consideration of Methods,” in Studies, vol. 1, pp. 97–98. 27. Lorenz, Natu­ral Science, pp.  283–284; the same diagram is printed in Lorenz, “Comparative Method,” in Symposia, p. 256.

28. Lorenz, Natu­ral Science, p. 293.

29. Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), pp. 49–50.

30. Lorenz, “Psy­chol­ogy and Phylogeny,” in Studies, vol. 2, p. 220.

31. Lorenz, “The Establishment of the Instinct Concept” (1937), in Studies, vol. 1, pp. 258–312. In the introduction to vol. 1 of Studies, Lorenz calls this paper “a distillate of the extensive correspondence” he had with Wallace Craig in 1935–1937 (p. xix).

32. Lorenz, “Inductive and Teleological Psy­chol­ogy” (1942), in Studies, vol. 1, p. 360.



33. Lorenz, “Taxis,” in Studies, vol. 1, p. 325.

34. See, for example, Lorenz, “Companions,” in Studies, vol. 1, pp. 251–252. Lorenz repeats Heinroth’s claim in On Aggression, pp. 202–203.

35. Lorenz, Natu­ral Science, pp. 254–255.

36. Lorenz, “Establishment,” in Studies, vol. 1, pp. 297–301. On the history of claims about animal emotions, see Anne C. Rose, In the Hearts of the Beasts: How American Be­ havioral Scientists Rediscovered the Emotions of Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 37. “How can he . . . ​know w ­ hether a fish feels emotions?” Bruce Chatwin asked in “The Education of Konrad Lorenz,” Atlas World Press Review 22, no. 6 (1975): 22. Lorenz defended himself against the charge of “false sentimentalist anthropomorphizing” in “Companions,” in Studies, vol. 1, p. 185.

38. Lorenz, “Introduction,” in Studies, vol. 1, p. xv. 279

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39. Lorenz, “Companions,” in Studies, vol. 1, p. 109.

40. On the idea of detailed witnessing as a means of establishing objectivity, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Ex­ perimental Life (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1985).

41. Lorenz, “Introduction,” in Studies, vol. 1, p. xvii.



42. Lorenz, “Contributions,” in Studies, vol. 1, p. 33.



43. Lorenz, “Establishment,” in Studies, vol. 1.



44. Lorenz, “Comparative Studies,” in Studies, vol. 2, pp. 14, 16.



45. Lorenz, Natu­ral Science, p. 217.

46. Lorenz, “Comparative Method,” in Symposia, p. 222. “The bird or fish ‘lover’ is in some re­spects the ideal observer,” Lorenz writes in this article (p. 240). 47. Lorenz, “Psy­chol­ogy and Phylogeny,” in Studies, vol. 2, pp. 235–236. Lorenz’s ideas on instinct w ­ ere ­shaped by t­ hose circulating in interwar German culture; see Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1996).

48. Lorenz, Man Meets Dog, p. 88.

49. Lorenz, “Companions,” in Studies, vol. 1, pp. 138 and 158; and Lorenz, “Taxis,” both in Studies, vol. 1. Lorenz, “Durch Domestikation verursachte Störungen arteigenen Verhaltens,” Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie und Charakterkunde 59 (1940): 2–81.

50. Burkhardt, Patterns of Be­hav­ior, pp. 241–242.



51. Burkhardt, Patterns of Be­hav­ior, p. 241.

52. Burkhardt, Patterns of Be­hav­ior, pp.  262–263. Lorenz, “Durch Domestikation”; Lorenz, “Nochmals: Systematik und Entwicklungsgedanke im Unterricht,” Der Biologe 9 (1940): 24–36. 53. Joan  E. Strassmann, “Tribute to Tinbergen: The Place of Animal Be­hav­ior in Biology,” Ethology 120 (2014): 123–126 (p.  125). See also Ute Deichmann, Biologists ­under Hitler, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp.  179–205 (esp. pp.  194–197). On Rudolf Hippius, the Nazi psychologist ­under whom Lorenz worked, see Egbert Klautke, “German ‘Race Psy­chol­ogy’ and Its Implementation in Central Eu­rope: Egon von Eickstedt and Rudolf Hippius,” in Blood and Home­ land: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Eu­rope, ed. Marius Turda and Paul  J. Weindling (New York: Central Eu­ro­pean University Press, 2007), pp. 23–40. 54. Burkhardt, Patterns of Be­hav­ior, pp. 267–270. On Lorenz’s war­time work, see the “Foreword” by Agnes von Cranach in Lorenz, Natu­ral Science. See also Theodora  J. 280

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­Kalikow, “Konrad Lorenz’s ‘Brown Past’: A Reply to Alec Nisbett,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 14, no.  2 (1978): 173–180; Deichmann, Biologists ­under Hitler, pp.  179–205; Benedikt Föger and Klaus Taschwer, Die andere Seite des Spiegels: Konrad Lorenz und der Nationalsozialismus (Vienna: Czernin, 2001); Peter Klopfer, “Konrad Lorenz and the National Socialists: On the Politics of Ethology,” International Journal of Comparative Ethology 7, no. 4 (1994): 202–208. 55. Lorenz, “Die angeborenen Formen möglicher Erfahrung” [Innate Forms of Pos­ si­ble Experience], Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 5 (1943): 235–409. 56. Lorenz, “Die angeborenen,” pp. 281, 287. Lorenz contrasts images of wild and domesticated animals on p. 303, and Socrates and Pericles on p. 305; terracotta figurines are pictured on pp. 304 and 305. 57. Burkhardt, Patterns of Be­hav­ior, p.  279; von Cranach, “Foreword,” in Lorenz, Natu­ral Science. 58. Burkhardt, Patterns of Be­hav­ior: on Altenberg, p. 304–306; on Buldern, p. 355–360; on Seewiesen, p. 371. See also Nisbett, Konrad Lorenz. 59. Lorenz, “Part and Parcel in Animal and H ­ uman Socie­ties” (1950), in Studies, vol. 2, p. 167.

60. Lorenz, “Psy­chol­ogy and Phylogeny,” in Studies, vol. 2, p. 237.



61. Lorenz, “Psy­chol­ogy and Phylogeny,” in Studies, vol. 2, pp. 233, 236.

62. Vicedo argues that Lorenz made his eugenic ideas more palatable in the postwar period by allying himself with psychoanalysts; see Vicedo, “­Father of Ethology.” 63. D. O. Hebb, “Heredity and Environment in Mammalian Be­hav­ior,” British Journal of Animal Behaviour 1 (1953): 43–47.

64. Hebb, “Heredity,” p. 47.

65. J. S. Kennedy, “Is Modern Ethology Objective?” British Journal of Animal Behav­ iour 2 (1954): 12–19 (p. 12).

66. Kennedy, p. 15.



67. Kennedy, p. 13.



68. Kennedy, p. 16.

69. Daniel  S. Lehrman, “A Critique of Konrad Lorenz’s Theory of Instinctive Be­ hav­ior,” Quarterly Review of Biology 298 (1953): 337–363. On Lehrman’s critique and his own research program, see Vicedo, Nature and Nurture, pp. 96–104.

70. Lehrman, p. 343.



71. Lehrman, p. 359. 281

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72. Lehrman, p. 350.



73. Lehrman, p. 355.



74. Lehrman, p. 354.

75. Jay  S. Rosenblatt, “Daniel Sanford Lehrman, June  1, 1919–­August  27, 1972,” Bio­ graphical Memoirs, vol. 66 (National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, 1995), pp. 226–245 (p. 235). 76. J. B. S. Haldane, “The Argument from Animals to Men: An Examination of Its Validity for Anthropology,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of ­Great Britain and Ireland 86, no. 2 (1956): 1–14 (p. 12).

77. Haldane, “Argument,” p. 5.

78. Lorenz, Evolution and Modification of Be­hav­ior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). This book appeared originally as “Phylogenetische Anpassung und adaptive Modifikation des Verhaltens” [Phyloge­ne­tic Adaptation and Adaptive Modification of Be­ hav­ior], in Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 18 (1961): 139–187.

79. Lorenz, Evolution, p. 44.



80. Lorenz, Evolution, p. 99.

81. See, for example, Elizabeth Hall, “The Short Po­liti­cal Aberration of Konrad Lo­ oday 8, no. 6 (1974): 84–85. renz,” Psy­chol­ogy T 82. “Five Baby Ducks Get ‘­Mother’ with Beard,” New York Herald Tribune, January 23, 1955. Lorenz and the ducklings w ­ ere also featured on Adventure, a nature tele­vi­sion show broadcast on CBS and sponsored by the American Museum of Natu­ral History. On Lorenz’s image as “­mother” in the American popu­lar media, see Vicedo, Nature and Nurture, esp. pp. 64–68. 83. “An ­Adopted M ­ other Goose: Filling a Parent’s Role, A Scientist Studies Goslings’ Be­hav­ior,” Life Magazine, August 22, 1955, pp. 73–78 (p. 73, pictures on pp. 74 and 77). 84. On the idea that science is an extension of childlike won­der, see Rebecca Stiles Onion, “Picturing Nature and Childhood at the American Museum of Natu­ral History and the Brooklyn C ­ hildren’s Museum, 1899–1930,” Journal of History of Childhood and Youth 4, ­ hildren Science: Hands-­On no. 3 (2011): 434–469; and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Teaching C Nature Study in North Amer­ic­ a, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 85. John Davy, “A Wise Man Made Wiser by a Stupid Goose,” Washington Post, July 3, 1966.

86. Lorenz, “The Evolution of Be­hav­ior,” Scientific American (1958): 67–78 (p. 69).



87. Lorenz, “Introduction,” in Studies, vol. 1, p. xvi.

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88. Margaret Morse Nice, Research Is a Passion with Me, ed. Doris Heustis Speirs, with a foreword by Konrad Lorenz (Toronto: Consolidated Amethyst Communications, 1979). On Nice, see Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, For the Birds: American Ornithologist Margaret Morse Nice (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018).

89. Burkhardt, Patterns of Be­hav­ior, p. 163.



90. Lorenz quoted in Evans, Konrad Lorenz, p. 82.



91. Philip Wylie, The Magic Animal (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968).



92. Lorenz, “Introduction,” in Studies, vol. 1, p. xiii.



93. On vernacular science, see Katherine Pandora, “Knowledge Held in Common.”

2. The Alchemy of Aggression Epigraph: Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 45.

1. Lorenz, On Aggression, p. 163.



2. Lorenz, On Aggression, p. 163.

3. Lorenz, Das Sogennante Böse: Zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression (Vienna: Dr. G. Borotha-​­Schoeler, 1963), translated into En­glish by Marjorie Kerr Wilson as On Ag­ gression (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966). 4. On Lorenz’s alliance with Bowlby and as expert on m ­ other love, see Vicedo, The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War Amer­ic­ a (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), chapters 1–3 and 8; and Vicedo, “The F ­ ather of Ethology and the Foster M ­ other of Ducks: Konrad Lorenz as an Expert on Motherhood,” Isis 100, no. 2 (June 2009): 263–291. On Lorenz’s On Aggression and psychoanalysis in West Germany, see Dagmar Herzog, Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), chapter 4. 5. Bowlby trained in medicine at University College Hospital, London, and in psychiatry at Maudsley Hospital. His autobiographical remarks appear in the “Introduction” to Discussions on Child Development: A Consideration of the Biological, Psychological, and Cultural Approaches to the Understanding of ­Human Development and Be­hav­ior (in one volume), ed. J. M. Tanner and Barbel Inhelder (New York: International Universities Press, 1971), p. I. 26. This volume contained the proceedings of the meetings of the World Health Organ­ization Study Group on the Psychological Development of the Child, which met in Geneva in 1953, 1955, and 1956, and in London in 1954. The proceedings w ­ ere originally published in four separate volumes (1956–1960) by Tavistock Publications, and the one-­ volume edition in 1971. The one-­volume edition kept separate pagination for each of the four proceedings. The study group’s permanent members included Bowlby, Lorenz,

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Margaret Mead, Jean Piaget, W. Grey Walter, and ­others; special guests included Erik Erikson, Julian Huxley, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy. 6. Vicedo, Nature and Nurture, p.  37. On the object-­relations theorists, see Eric Rayner, The In­de­pen­dent Mind in British Psychoanalysis (London: ­Free Association Books, 1990) and Gregorio Kohon, ed., The British School of Psychoanalysis: The In­de­pen­dent Tra­ dition (London: ­Free Association Books, 1986). On Melanie Klein, see Phyllis Grosskurth, Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986); Hannah Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (London: Karnac, 1988); and Jacqueline Rose, Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). On psychoanalysis in postwar Britain, see Michal Shapira, The War Inside: Psycho­ analysis, Total War and the Making of the Demo­cratic Self in Postwar Britain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 7. Bowlby, Child Care and the Growth of Love, Based on the Permission of the World Health Organ­ization on the Report Maternal Care and ­Mental Health (London: Penguin Press, 1953), pp. 18, 30.

8. Bowlby, “Introduction,” in Discussions, p. 27.



9. Bowlby, “Introduction,” in Discussions, p. 27.



10. Bowlby, Child Care, p. 15.



11. See Tanner and Inhelder, Discussions.

12. Bowlby, “The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His M ­ other,” International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis 39 (1958): 350–373, pp. 362–363.

13. Bowlby, “Nature of the Child’s Tie,” p. 366.



14. Bowlby, “Nature of the Child’s Tie,” p. 351.

15. The perception of a natu­ral fit between the disciplines was not ­limited to Lorenz and Bowlby: a session at the meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York in December 1959 featured a session on “Psychoanalysis and Ethology.” See Mortimer Ostow, MD, “Psychoanalysis and Ethology,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Asso­ ciation 8 (1960): 526–534. 16. For Lorenz, ­mother love and aggression w ­ ere not isolated aspects of be­hav­ior but reinforced each other in a cyclical way. The proper disposal of aggression meant that an animal could create a lasting bond with the right type of love-­object, and thereby set the stage for becoming the right type of parent. Providing the right object on which offspring could imprint, in turn, ensured that the young would develop the proper social relationships ­later in life, including the proper redirection of aggression. In 1940, Lorenz had described “fighting spirit and motherly love” as “the two characteristics that are necessary for the preservation of the species” (in Königsberger Allgemeine Zeitung, November 2, 1940, quoted in Vicedo, Nature and Nurture, p. 49). 284

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17. Lorenz, The Natu­ral Science of the H ­ uman Species: An Introduction to Comparative Behavioral Research (The “Rus­sian Manuscript,” 1944–1948), ed. Agnes von Cranach, trans. Robert Martin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996 [German original 1992]), p. xxvi. 18. Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring: New Light on Animal Ways, trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (New York: Harper and Row, 1952). (Orig. German title Er redete mit dem Vieh, den Vögeln, und den Fischen, 1949 [“He talked with the beasts, the birds, and the fish”].

19. Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring, pp. 185–186.



20. Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring, p. 184.



21. Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring, p. 199.

22. Lorenz, “The Comparative Method in Studying Innate Behaviour Patterns,” Sym­ posia of the Society for Experimental Biology, No. 4: Physiological Mechanisms in Animal Be­ haviour (New York: Academic Press, 1950), pp. 221–268 (p. 229). 23. Lorenz, “Part and Parcel in Animal and H ­ uman Socie­ties: A Methodological Dis­ uman Behaviour, vol. 2, trans. Robert Martin (Camcussion,” in Studies in Animal and H bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 115–195 (p. 149).

24. Lorenz, “Part and Parcel,” p. 150.



25. Lorenz, “Part and Parcel,” p. 187.



26. Lorenz, “Part and Parcel,” p. 195.



27. Lorenz, On Aggression, pp. 41, 38–39.



28. Lorenz, On Aggression, p. 83.

29. Lorenz, On Aggression, p. 100; chapter 6 is titled “The G ­ reat Parliament of Instincts,” pp. 81–103.

30. Lorenz, On Aggression, p. 127.



31. Lorenz, On Aggression, p. 167.



32. Lorenz, On Aggression, pp. 181, 197, 189.



33. Lorenz, On Aggression, p. 203.



34. Lorenz, On Aggression, p. 244–245.



35. Lorenz, On Aggression, pp. 259–260.



36. Lorenz, On Aggression, p. 183.

37. “The self-­assertive side of my nature was driven under­ground, making me appear more timidly compliant than I ­really was. This type of childhood experience was the subjective stimulus which l­ater made me take an especial interest in the prob­lems posed by 285

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the aggressive aspect of ­human be­hav­ior” (Storr’s unpublished autobiography, chapter 2, p. 12, in the private collection of Catherine Peters, Oxford, E ­ ngland). 38. Anthony Stevens, “Anthony Storr, Gifted Psychiatrist Whose Compassionate Approach Was Born of His Own Childhood Suffering and Loneliness,” The Guardian, March 20, 2001, p. 1.

39. Stevens, “Anthony Storr,” pp. 1–2.

40. Maarten Derksen, “Science in the Clinic: Clinical Psy­chol­ogy at the Maudsley,” in Psy­chol­ogy in Britain: Historical Essays, Personal Reflections, ed. G. C. Bunn, A. D. Lovie, and G. C. Richards (Leicester: British Psychological Society, 2001).

41. Storr quoted in Stevens, “Anthony Storr,” p. 2.



42. Storr, unpublished autobiography, preface, p. 1.

43. See Edward Armstrong Bennet, What Jung ­Really Said (New York: Schocken Books, 1983 [1967], with a new introduction by Anthony Storr), pp. vii–­xiii. 44. Oliver Burkeman, “Anthony Storr, the Face of Psychiatry, Dies,” The Guardian, March 20, 2001, http://­guardian​.­co​.­uk​/­uk​/­2001​/­mar​/­20​/ ­highereducation​.­education​/­print. Storr wrote books on a wide array of topics, including art, ­music, creativity, and solitude, and edited volumes of the writings of Jung and Freud.

45. Storr, Integrity of the Personality (London: Heinemann, 1960).

46. Storr, “Introduction,” in The Essential Jung, ed. Anthony Storr (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1983), pp. 13–27 (p. 19).

47. Storr, ­Human Aggression (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 93.



48. Storr, Integrity, p. 33. On the object-­relations theorists, see fn 5.

49. Storr, ­Human Aggression, pp. 18–19, 74–75. On Adler and Jung, see Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), chapters 8 and 9; on Jung, see Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1994). On Adler’s controversy with Freud over aggression, see Paul E. Stepansky, In Freud’s Shadow: Adler in Context (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, Lawrence Erlbaum, 1983); Stepansky, A History of Aggression in Freud (New York: International Universities Press, 1977), chapter 5. On the development of Freud’s concept of aggression, see Ulrike May, “The Third Step in Drive Theory: On the Genesis of Beyond the Plea­sure Princi­ple,” Psychoanalysis and History 17 (2015): 205–272.

50. Storr, Integrity, p. 57.



51. Storr, Integrity, pp. 144, 56, 58.



52. Storr, Integrity, p. 55.

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53. Storr, Integrity, pp. 134, 137.



54. Storr, Integrity, p. 20.



55. Storr, Integrity, p. 50.

56. On Bowlby’s claim that corroboration from another, especially higher-­status, discipline indicates the truth of a theory, see Vicedo, Nature and Nurture, pp. 71, 86–87. 57. J. D. Carthy and F. J. Ebling, The Natu­ral History of Aggression (London: Academic Press, 1964). Proceedings of a symposium held at the British Museum of Natu­ral History in London, October 21–23, 1963; Institute of Biology Symposia No. 13.

58. Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative (New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. 301.



59. Lorenz quoted in Carthy and Ebling, “Introduction,” in Natu­ral History, pp. 3–4.



60. Carthy and Ebling, “Introduction,” in Natu­ral History, p. 3.



61. Lorenz, “Ritualized Fighting,” in Natu­ral History, p. 47.



62. Denis Hill, “Aggression and M ­ ental Illness,” in Natu­ral History, p. 98.



63. Stanislav Andreski, “Origins of War,” in Natu­ral History, p. 136.

64. John Burton, “The Nature of Aggression as Revealed in the Atomic Age,” in Natu­ral History, pp. 148–149.

65. Lorenz, comment in Natu­ral History, p. 155.

66. The other was the Australian psychologist Derek Freeman, who defended Raymond Dart’s paleoanthropological contention that use of weapons to hunt and kill had accelerated ­human evolution. See Freeman, “­Human Aggression in Anthropological Perspective,” in Natu­ral History, pp. 109–119. In the 1980s Freeman became an out­spoken critic of Margaret Mead’s ethnography of Samoa in his book Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Un­ making of an Anthropological Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). On the Mead-­Freeman controversy see Paul Shankman, The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).

67. Storr, “Pos­si­ble Substitutes for War,” in Natu­ral History, p. 140.



68. Storr, “Pos­si­ble Substitutes,” in Natu­ral History, pp. 140, 144, 143.



69. Lorenz, comment in Natu­ral History, p. 121.



70. Lorenz, “Ritualized Fighting,” in Natu­ral History, p. 49.



71. Storr, “Pos­si­ble Substitutes,” in Natu­ral History, p. 137.



72. Storr, ­Human Aggression, p. 24.



73. Storr, ­Human Aggression, pp. 78–79. 287

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74. Storr, ­Human Aggression, p. 159.



75. Storr, ­Human Aggression, p. 68.



76. Storr, ­Human Aggression, pp. 88–89.



77. See, for example, Lorenz’s remarks in Discussions, p. I. 222.



78. Storr, ­Human Aggression, dedication; and Lorenz’s blurb on book cover.

79. Lorenz to Storr, January  16, 1968, in the private collection of Catherine Peters, Oxford, UK. 80. Lorenz to Storr, January  29, 1968, in the private collection of Catherine Peters, Oxford, UK. The two also struck up a personal friendship; Catherine Peters, Storr’s ­widow, remembered visiting Lorenz at Seewiesen in the mid-1970s (personal communication with the author, June 8, 2020). 81. Lorenz to Storr, January  16, 1968, in the private collection of Catherine Peters, Oxford, UK.

3. Weapons Created Man Epigraph: Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Ori­ gins of Property and Nations (New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. 6. 1. Robert Ardrey, African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man (New York: Atheneum, 1961), pp. 32, 189.

2. Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 188.

3. Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 32. Sigrid Schmalzer notes that the obverse of this argument was made by Friedrich Engels—­that “­labor created humanity.” See Schmalzer, The ­People’s Peking Man: Popu­lar Science and H ­ uman Identity in Twentieth-­Century China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), chapter 3. See also Schmalzer, “­Labor Created Humanity: Cultural Revolution Science on Its Own Terms,” in The Chinese Cultural Revo­ lution as History, ed. Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Andrew G. Walder (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 185–210. 4. Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. 6. 5. In addition to African Genesis, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1962, and The Territorial Imperative, Ardrey’s popu­lar science books included two ­later volumes as well: The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder (New York: Atheneum, 1970) and The Hunting Hypothesis: A Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man (New York: Atheneum, 1976).

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6. My argument in this chapter draws on Nadine Weidman, “Popularizing the Ancestry of Man: Robert Ardrey and the Killer Instinct,” Isis 102, no. 2 (2011): 269–299. 7. The play was “Star Spangled.” See Robert Ardrey, “A Preface to the Plays, Including Certain Personal Reflections,” in Plays of Three De­cades (New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 14.

8. Ardrey, “Preface,” in Plays.



9. Ardrey, “Preface,” in Plays, pp. 14, 18.

10. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993), p. 265. Details of Ardrey’s life have been gleaned from his unpublished autobiography, written in the late 1970s, “The Education of Robert Ardrey: An Autobiography,” edited and with a preface by Daniel Ardrey (1995), box 11, folders 3 and 4, from the Robert Ardrey Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University (hereafter Ardrey Autobiography).

11. Ardrey, “Preface,” in Plays, pp. 22–23.



12. Ardrey Autobiography, p. 181.



13. Ardrey Autobiography, p. 165.

14. For a history of this episode and of the blacklist in Hollywood see Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003). See also John Joseph Gladchuk, Hollywood and Anticommunism: HUAC and the Evolution of the Red Menace, 1935–1950 (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Gerald Horne, The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

15. Ardrey Autobiography, quotes pp. 180, 181–182.



16. Navasky, Naming Names, p. 182.



17. Ardrey Autobiography, p. 187.

18. Navasky, Naming Names, p. 202. See also Elia Kazan, Elia Kazan: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1988).

19. Ardrey, Social Contract, p. 118.



20. Ardrey Autobiography, p. 191.



21. Ardrey, Sing Me No Lullaby (New York: Dramatists Play Ser­vice, 1955), p. 57.

22. Ardrey, Sing Me, p. 66. Brooks Atkinson reviewed the play positively in the New York Times, October 15 and October 24, 1954. On Eric Sevareid’s defense of the play, see Raymond A. Schroth, The American Journey of Eric Sevareid (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1995), p. 194.

23. Ardrey, Sing Me, p. 7.

289

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24. Saul Dubow, Apartheid, 1948–1994 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014). On the use of Ardrey’s work to support apartheid, see Dubow, “Racial Irredentism, Ethnogenesis, and White Supremacy in High Apartheid South Africa,” Kronos 41, no.  1 (2015): 236–264. 25. In the order they appeared, Ardrey’s Reporter pieces ­were “The Sweetest Boy in All the World: A Short Story about ­Kenya” (April 7, 1955), pp. 36–39; “A Slight (Archaic) Case of Murder” (May  5, 1955), pp.  34–36; “The Ea­gles of Swaziland” (June  16, 1955), pp. 31–34; “What’s Wrong with Gold? Mr. Marbly Knows” (July 14, 1955), pp. 40–44; and “South Africa: A Personal Report” (November 27, 1958), pp. 22–27.

26. Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 186.

27. Raymond Dart, “Australopithecus africanus: The Man-­Ape of South Africa,” Na­ ture 115, no. 2884 (1925): 195–199. On Dart as iconoclast, see Philip V. Tobias, “Raymond Arthur Dart, the Man Who Unwillingly Ushered in a Revolution in the Evolution of Humankind,” in Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology, ed. Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp.  84–102. On the connections between Dart’s work with Australopithecus, his views on race, and his social context, see Saul Dubow, “­Human Origins, Race Typology, and the Other Raymond Dart,” African Studies 55, no.  1 (1996): 1–30; and Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also Henrika Kuklick, “Contested Monuments: The Politics of Archaeology in Southern Africa,” in Colonial Situations, ed. George  W. Stocking,  Jr. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp.  135–169. For a hagiography of Dart, see Frances Wheel­house and Kathaleen  S. Smithford, Dart, Scientist and Man of Grit (Sydney: Transpareon Press, 2001). Misia Landau includes a discussion of Dart in Narratives of ­Human Evolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991) on pages 150–156. 28. On Piltdown, see Ronald Millar, The Piltdown Men: A Case of Archaeological Fraud (London: Victor Gallancz, 1972); and J. S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 [1955], with a new introduction and afterword by Chris Stringer). See also K. P. Oakley and C. Hoskins, “New Evidence on the Antiquity of Piltdown Man,” Nature 165 (1950): 379–382; K. P. Oakley and J. S. Weiner, “Piltdown Man,” American Scien­ tist 43 (1955): 573–583. 29. Dart, “The Status of Australopithecus,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 26 (1940): 167–186 (quote p. 178). 30. Dart, “Promethean Australopithecus from Makapansgat Valley,” Nature 162 (1948): 375–376 (quote p. 375). 31. Dart, “Predatory Instrumental Technique of Australopithecus,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 7 (ns) (1949): 1–17 (quotes pp. 5, 9). 290

32. Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 30.

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33. Dart, “The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man,” International Anthropological and Linguistic Review 1, no. 4 (1953): 201–219 (quotes pp. 204, 207). 34. Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 31. For a history of debates about when h ­ umans became ­human, see Robert N. Proctor, “Three Roots of H ­ uman Recency: Molecular Anthropology, the Refigured Acheulean, and the UNESCO Response to Auschwitz,” Current Anthro­ pology 44, no. 2 (2003): 213–239.

35. Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 195.



36. Ardrey, “Slight (Archaic) Case,” pp. 34–36 (p. 35).



37. Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 202.

38. S. L. Washburn, “Australopithecines: The Hunters or the Hunted?” American An­ thropologist, 59 (ns), no.  4 (1957): 612–614 (quotes pp.  612, 614). See also Noel  T. Boaz, “American Research on Australopithecus and Early Homo, 1925–1980,” in A History of American Physical Anthropology, 1930–1980, ed. Frank Spencer (New York: Academic Press, 1982), pp. 239–260.

39. Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 203.

40. Ardrey, African Genesis, p.  203. On Wilkie, See Wolfgang Saxon, “Leighton  A. Wilkie, Tool Manufacturer and an Inventor, 93,” New York Times, December  16, 1993. Wilkie also underwrote the costs of Ardrey’s field research for his 1966 book, The Territo­ rial Imperative (p. xii). 41. Raymond Dart, “The Cultural Status of the South African Man-­Apes,” Smithsonian Report for 1955 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1956), pp. 317–338. 42. Raymond Dart with Dennis Craig, Adventures with the Missing Link (New York: Viking Press / Harper and B ­ rothers, 1959). Dart credited the book’s origins to Ardrey.

43. Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 287.



44. Ardrey, African Genesis, pp. 332, 89.



45. Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 364.

46. Ardrey, Shadow of Heroes: A Play in Five Acts from the Hungarian Passion, in Plays of Three De­cades (New York: Atheneum, 1968).

47. Ardrey, “Preface,” in Plays, p. 31.

48. For a list of Ardrey’s screenplays, see robertardrey​.­com. On Khartoum, see David Levering Lewis, “Khartoum,” in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, ed. Mark C. Carnes (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), pp. 162–165.

49. Ardrey African Genesis, p. 210. 291

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50. Kenneth MacLeish, “Provocative Clues to the H ­ uman Mystery: In Deepest Africa, a Startling Link to Man,” Life magazine, November 24, 1961, pp. 85–98. 51. “Aggression and Vio­lence in Man: A Dialogue between Dr.  Louis Leakey and Mr.  Robert Ardrey,” Munger Africana Library Notes 9, November  1971 (Pasadena, CA: Munger Africana Library). 52. Lorenz quoted in Richard I. Evans, Konrad Lorenz: The Man and His Ideas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 82.

53. “Aggression and Vio­lence in Man,” p. 15.



54. Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 263.

55. Ardrey to Simon Michael Bessie, January 29, 1961, box 2, folder “African Genesis Correspondence, 1959–­May 30, 1961,” from the Robert Ardrey Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University (hereafter HGARC). On the importance of visual images in the sciences of ­human ancestry, see Stephanie Moser, Ancestral Images: The Iconography of ­Human Origins (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). Using Hollywood as his point of reference, Ardrey insisted on the word “African” in the title of his book: “It is box office,” he wrote to W. A. R. Collins, February 9, 1961 (box 2, folder “African Genesis Correspondence, 1959–­May 30, 1961,” Robert Ardrey Collection, HGARC). On the use of Hollywood artifice as a technique in nature films, see Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: Amer­i­ca’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), and Mitman, “Cinematic Nature: Hollywood Technology, Popu­lar Culture, and the American Museum of Natu­ral History,” Isis 84 (1993): 637–661.

56. Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 188.

57. Dubow analyzes Dart’s “intuition and imagination” in “­ Human Origins,” pp. 25–27.

58. Dart, “Predatory Transition,” p. 204.

59. Solly Zuckerman, From Apes to Warlords: The Autobiography (1904–1946) of Solly Zuckerman (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), p. 15. On Zuckerman’s critique of Dart, see Jesse Richmond, “Experts and Australopithecines: Credibility and Controversy in the Science of H ­ uman Evolution, 1924–1959” (PhD diss., University of California at Santa Cruz, 2009), chapter 4. 60. Ardrey to Ashley Montagu, July 30, 1961, “Robert Ardrey” folder, Ashley Montagu papers, ms. coll. 109, American Philosophical Society Library. 61. Ardrey to S. M. Bessie, January 23, 1961, box 2, folder “African Genesis Correspondence, 1959–­May 30, 1961,” from the Robert Ardrey Collection at HGARC. In this letter Ardrey reported a conversation between two executives at Collins Publishers, in which one said, “Well, Billy, the way I look at it this is Ardrey’s science.” Ardrey continued, “That about sums it.” 292

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62. Ardrey, African Genesis, pp. 12, 15–17.



63. Ardrey, African Genesis, pp. 36–37.



64. Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 35.

65. Ardrey’s criticism of Leakey’s misnaming of Australopithecus as Zinjanthropus is on page 279 of African Genesis. His criticism of Broom’s misnaming of Australopithecus as Pleisanthropus is on page 181. On page 264 Ardrey criticized Oakley’s theory that primates on the Miocene prairies of ­Kenya w ­ ere true bipeds. 66. Ardrey, African Genesis, pp.  299–317. See also Dart, “The Myth of the Bone-­ Accumulating Hyena,” American Anthropologist (ns) 58, no.  1 (1956): 40–62; Washburn, “Australopithecines: The Hunters or the Hunted?” American Anthropologist (ns) 59, no. 4 (1957): 612–614; Dart, “The Minimal Bone-­Breccia Content of Makapansgat and the Australopithecine Predatory Habit,” American Anthropologist (ns) 60, no.  5 (1958): 923–931; and Dart, “The Bone Tool-­Manufacturing Ability of Australopithecus Prometheus,” Amer­ ican Anthropologist (ns) 62, no. 1 (1960): 134–143.

67. Ardrey, African Genesis, pp. 206, 337.

68. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008 [1959]), quotes pp. 22, 25. On Snow and the two cultures debate, see Andrew Jewett, Sci­ ence ­Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), pp. 124–130. 69. See Robert Maynard Hutchins, No Friendly Voice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936). 70. Robert Maynard Hutchins, “Science, Scientists, and Politics,” in Hutchins et  al., Science, Scientists, and Politics: An Occasional Paper on the Role of Science and Technology in the ­Free Society (Santa Barbara, CA: Center for the Study of Demo­cratic Institutions, 1963), pp. 1–4 (quote p. 1).

71. Hutchins, “Science, Scientists,” p. 1.



72. Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 12.

73. Ardrey to S. M. Bessie, January 23, 1961, box 2, folder “African Genesis Correspondence 1959–­May  30, 1961,” Robert Ardrey Collection, HGARC. Simon Michael Bessie (1916–2008) helped found Atheneum Publishers in 1959 and was its president from 1963 to 1971. See the obituary by Christopher Lehmann-­Haupt, “Simon Michael Bessie, a Publisher of Major Literary Figures, Dies at 92,” New York Times, April 8, 2008. 74. Ardrey to S.  M. Bessie, May  31, 1961, box 2, folder “African Genesis Correspondence, May 31, 1961–­Sept 1, 1961,” Robert Ardrey Collection, HGARC. Hutchins (1899–1977) was an out­spoken critic of McCarthyism, as was Walter Lipp­mann (1889–1974), the journalist. Stevenson (1900–1965) was the Illinois governor and Demo­cratic presidential c­ andidate; 293

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Mortimer Adler (1902–2001) was a phi­los­o­pher and educator; and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) a liberal Protestant theologian. 75. Ardrey to S. M. Bessie, June 22, 1962, box 2, folder “African Genesis Correspondence, September 4, 1961–­January 1, 1964,” Robert Ardrey Collection, HGARC.

76. Marston Bates, “Review of African Genesis,” New York Times, November 19, 1961.

77. Arthur Jones, “Review of African Genesis,” Social Science 37 (Oct. 1962): 258–260 (quote p. 259).

78. Jack Goody, “Review of African Genesis,” The Guardian, November 10, 1961, p. 6.

79. Sally Carrighar, “Review of African Genesis,” Saturday Review, December 16, 1961, p. 14. Carrighar, ironically, was a pop­ul­ ar­izer herself and had worked in Hollywood editing scripts before turning to nature writing. See Carrighar, Home to the Wilderness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), esp. pp. 164, 197, and 207. 80. Eric Sevareid, “Review of African Genesis,” New York Herald Tribune Books, November 12, 1961, p. 3. 81. Ardrey to R. J. Politzer, September 1, 1961, box 2, folder “African Genesis Correspondence, May 31 1961–­Sept. 1, 1961,” Robert Ardrey Collection, HGARC. 82. Ardrey went on to play a role in establishing the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for the support of scientific research in the biological basis of ­human nature; see Erika Lorraine Milam, “Men in Groups: Anthropology and Aggression, 1965–1984,” in Scientific Masculinities, ed. Erika Lorraine Milam and Robert A. Nye, Osiris 30 (2015): 66–88.

83. Ardrey, Territorial Imperative, p. 267.

84. Ardrey, Territorial Imperative, pp. 301, 302–303. Excerpts from the book appeared in Life magazine: “The Basic Drive—­for Territory,” Life, August 26, 1966, pp. 40–59; and “Man, the Territorial Animal,” Life, September 2, 1966, pp. 50–59. See also George P. Hunt, “Provocateur in Anthropology,” Life, August 26, 1966, p. 3.

85. Ardrey, Territorial Imperative, p. 141.



86. Ardrey, Territorial Imperative, p. 271.

87. Ardrey, Territorial Imperative, p. 191. Nation was opposed to “noyau,” the society of inward antagonism, which Ardrey viewed as a less highly developed social form. Italy was his prime example of a noyau.

88. Ardrey, Territorial Imperative, pp. 116, 309.

89. For an indication of the staying power of this argument, see Steven Levingston and International Herald Tribune, “Meanwhile: Does Territoriality Drive ­Human Aggression?” in New York Times (April  14, 1999), which applies Ardrey’s thesis to the con­temporary crisis in Kosovo. 294

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90. Ardrey, Territorial Imperative, pp. 340–341, 343.



91. Ardrey, African Genesis, p. 161.



92. Ardrey, Territorial Imperative, pp. 116–117.

93. Ardrey to Ashley Montagu, June 29, 1969, “Robert Ardrey” folder, Ashley Montagu papers, ms. coll. 109, American Philosophical Society Library. 94. ­These po­liti­cal associations long outlasted Ardrey’s book and even the Cold War itself. Steven Pinker asserts that environmentalism was disproven when the Soviet Union ­ uman Nature (New York: Viking, collapsed: Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of H 2002), p. 296. 95. See, for example, Julian H. Steward, “Causal ­Factors and Pro­cesses in the Evolution of Pre-­farming Socie­ties,” in Man the Hunter, ed. Richard  B. Lee and Irven DeVore (Chicago: Aldine, 1968), pp. 321–334 (p. 330). 96. Hamburg made the comment in a discussion; see p.  339  in Man the Hunter. Lee and DeVore w ­ ere former students of Washburn. See the obituary of Washburn by Adrienne Zihlman in American Journal of Physical Anthropology 116, no.  3 (2001): 181–183. 97. Sherwood Washburn and C. S. Lancaster, “The Evolution of Hunting,” in Man the Hunter, p. 293. On Washburn, see Donna J. Haraway, “Remodelling the ­Human Way of Life: Sherwood Washburn and the New Physical Anthropology, 1950–1980,” in Bones, Bodies, Be­hav­ior: Essays on Biological Anthropology, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 206–259. See also Washburn, “The New Physical Anthropology,” Transactions of the New York Acad­emy of Science (ser. 2) 13 (1951): 298–304, reprinted in Readings in Anthropology, ed. Jesse Jennings and E. Adamson Hoebel (New York: McGraw Hill, 1955), pp. 75–81; Washburn, “The Strategy of Physical Anthropology,” ­ oday, ed. Alfred L. Kroeber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), in Anthropology T pp.  714–727; Washburn, “Tools and ­Human Evolution,” Scientific American 203, no.  3 (1960): 3–15; and Washburn, ed., The Social Life of Early Man (New York: Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, no. 31, 1961). Washburn briefly discusses the aggression controversy and Dart’s and Ardrey’s role in it in “­Human Evolution a­fter Raymond Dart” (23rd  Raymond Dart Lecture, Jan.  28, 1985) (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press for the Study of Man in Africa, 1985). 98. Washburn and Lancaster, “Evolution of Hunting,” in Man the Hunter, p. 293. Ardrey discussed Washburn’s change of heart on pp. 19–21 in The Hunting Hypothesis.

99. Washburn and Lancaster, “Evolution of Hunting,” in Man the Hunter, p. 296. 100. Washburn and Lancaster, “Evolution of Hunting,” in Man the Hunter, pp. 299–300.

101. Turnbull and Schneider made t­hese comments in discussion, in Man the Hunter, p. 341. 295

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102. Charles E. Osgood, An Alternative to War or Surrender (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), p.  17. The similarity to Ardrey’s reasoning is noted in Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange ­Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 210, fn 25. Osgood’s notion of “cultural lag” between man’s primitive emotions and his advanced weaponry also owes much to Lorenz. 103. Star Trek (original series), “The ­Enemy Within,” October 6, 1966. 104. On Kubrick’s and Clarke’s use of African Genesis as the inspiration for the opening sequence, see Robert Poole, “2001: A Space Odyssey and the ‘Dawn of Man,’ ” in Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives, ed. Tatjana Ljujić, Peter Krämer, and Richard Daniels (London: Black Dog, 2015), pp. 174–197.

4. The Biology of Love Epigraph: Ashley Montagu, On Being ­Human (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), p. 100. 1. UNESCO followed the mandate of the United Nations, which had ensured rights and freedoms to all p ­ eople regardless of race in its “Universal Declaration of H ­ uman Rights,” UN General Assembly, December  10, 1948, 217  A (III). See Anthony  Q. H ­ azard, Postwar Anti-­Racism: The U.S., UNESCO, and Race, 1945–1968 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 2. Ashley Montagu, “The Story of UNESCO’s Statement on Race Prob­lems,” in State­ ment on Race: An Extended Discussion in Plain Language of the UNESCO Statement by Ex­ perts on Race Prob­lems (New York: Henry Schuman, 1951), pp. 3–10. 3. Montagu, Statement, pp. 16, 17–18. On the history of the UNESCO Statements on Race, see Michelle Brattain, “Race, Racism, and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public,” American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (2007): 1386– 1413; Elazar Barkan, “The Politics of the Science of Race: Ashley Montagu and UNESCO’s Anti-­Racist Declarations,” in Race and Other Misadventures: Essays in Honor of Ashley ­Montagu in His 90th Year, ed. Larry T. Reynolds and Leonard Lieberman (Dix Hills, NY: General Hall, 1996), pp. 96–105; Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 341–343; Robert Proctor, “Three Roots of H ­ uman Recency: Molecular Anthropology, the Refigured Acheulean, and the UNESCO Response to Auschwitz,” Current Anthropology 44 (2003): 213–239; Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and ­Governance in an Age of Genomics (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005), esp. pp. 17–44; Anthony Q. ­Hazard Jr., “A Racialized Deconstruction? Ashley Montagu and the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race,” Transforming Anthropology 19, no. 2 (2011): 174–186; Sebastián Gil-­Riaño, “Historicizing Anti-­Racism: UNESCO’s Campaigns against Race Prejudice 296

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in the 1950s” (PhD diss., University of Toronto); Tracy Teslow, Constructing Race: The Science of Bodies and Cultures in American Anthropology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Perrin Selcer, “Beyond the Cephalic Index: Negotiating Politics to Produce UNESCO’s Scientific Statements on Race,” Current Anthropology 53 (s5) (2012): s173–­s184; and Staffan Müller-­Wille, “Race et appartenance ethnique: la diversité humaine et l’UNESCO Déclarations sur la race (1950 et 1951) (Race and Ethnicity: H ­ uman Diversity and the UNESCO Declarations on Race [1950 and 1951]),” in 60 ans d’histoire de l’UNESCO (60 Years of UNESCO History) (Paris: UNESCO, 2007), pp. 211–220. 4. The second Statement was published in The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry, Race Question in Modern Science (Paris: UNESCO, 1953). It also appears in Montagu, Statement, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 139–147. 5. On the Aliens Act, see “Jewish Migration: Aliens Act,” Jewish Virtual Library, 2008, jewishvirtuallibrary​.­org. 6. His ­adopted name was originally Montague Francis Ashley Montagu, sometimes abbreviated M. F. Ashley Montagu, l­ ater shortened to Ashley Montagu.

7. See Arthur Keith, The Antiquity of Man (London: Williams and Norgate, 1915).

8. Montagu, Coming into Being among the Australian Aborigines: A Study of the Pro­ creative Beliefs of the Native Tribes of Australia (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1937). 9. On Montagu, see Susan Sperling, “Ashley Montagu, 1905–1999,” American Anthro­ pologist 102, no. 3 (2000): 583–588; Andrew Lyons, “The Neotenic ­Career of M. F. Ashley Montagu,” in Race and Other, pp. 3–22; Leonard Lieberman, Andrew Lyons, and Harriet Lyons, “An Interview with Ashley Montagu,” Current Anthropology 36, no. 5 (1995): 835–844; Stevan Harnad, “Ashley Montagu Biographical Essay,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sci­ ences 18 (1980): 535–537; and Stevan Harnad, “Ashley Montagu, Anthropologist and Social Biologist 1905–1999,” Notable American Unitarians, http://­www​.­harvardsquarelibrary​.­org​ /­unitarians​/­montagu​.h ­ tml. 10. The association declined to adopt the resolution. See Lyons, “Neotenic C ­ areer,” p. 11, and Elazar Barkan, Retreat, p. 339. 11. Montagu, “The Socio-­Biology of Man,” Scientific Monthly 50, no.  6 (1940): 483– 490 (p. 488). 12. Montagu, “The Nature of War and the Myth of Nature,” Scientific Monthly 54, no. 4 (1942): 342–353 (p. 344).

13. Montagu, “Nature of War,” pp. 351–352.

14. The subheading is borrowed from The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). David Paul Crook refers to the group of World War I–­era Darwin-­inspired pacifist biologists as “peace biologists” in Darwinism, War, and History: The Debate over the Origin of War from the 297

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“­ Origin of Species” to the First World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). I use the term to include both World War I—­and World War II–­era biologists. 15. On the peace biologists, see Gregg Mitman, The State of Nature: Ecol­ogy, Commu­ nity, and American Social Thought, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), esp. pp. 58–71; quote p. 69. 16. See William Ritter, War, Science, and Civilization (Boston: Sherman, French, and Co., 1915); David Starr Jordan, Ways to Lasting Peace (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merill, 1916); Edwin Grant Conklin, “Biology and Democracy,” Scribner’s 65 (1919): 403–412; and William Patten, “The Message of the Biologist,” Science 51 (1920): 93–102. 17. Kropotkin (1842–1921) renounced the nobility and devoted his life to the cause of social justice. See Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1930 [1899]); George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumović, The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin (New York: TV Boardman, 1950); Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); and Lee Alan Dugatkin, The Prince of Evolution: Peter Kropotkin’s Adventures in Science and Politics (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2011). On Kropotkin’s evolutionism, see Daniel P. Todes, Darwin without Malthus: The Strug­gle for Existence in Rus­sian Evolutionary Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Eric M. Johnson, “The Strug­gle for Coexistence: Peter Kropotkin and the Social Ecol­ogy of Science in Rus­sia, Eu­rope, and E ­ ngland, 1859–1922” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2019); and Dugatkin, The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Ori­ gins of Goodness (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011). On Kropotkin’s politics, see Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

18. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (New York: McClure, Philips, 1902), p. ix.



19. Darwin quoted in Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p. 2.

20. See Joanne Meyero­witz, “ ‘How Common Culture Shapes the Separate Lives’: Sexuality, Race, and Mid-­Twentieth C ­ entury Social Constructivist Thought,” Journal of Amer­ ican History 96, no. 4 (2010): 1057–1084 (esp. 1073). 21. Chauncey D. Leake, “Science Implies Freedom” in Leake and Patrick Romanell, Can We Agree? A Scientist and a Phi­los­o­pher Argue about Ethics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1950), pp. 93–103 (p. 93; emphasis original). On Leake, see Eugene Garfield, “To Remember Chauncey D. Leake,” Essays of an Information Scientist 3, no. 7 (1978): 411– 421, http://­www​.­garfield​.­library​.­upenn​.­edu; and “Chauncey Depew Leake,” University of ­ rg. California in Memoriam 1978, Calisphere: http://­texts​.­cdlib​.o 22. Julian Huxley, “Evolutionary Ethics” (The Romanes Lectures, 1943), reprinted in T. H. Huxley and Julian Huxley, Touchstone for Ethics, 1893–1943 (New York: Harper and ­Brothers, 1947), pp. 113–166 (p. 114; emphasis original).

298

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23. C. H. Waddington, Science and Ethics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1942), p. 15. 24. On the history of the naturalistic fallacy, see “Focus: The Peculiar Per­sis­tence of the Naturalistic Fallacy,” Isis 105, no. 3 (2014): 564–616. 25. Edwin G. Conklin, “Does Science Afford a Basis for Ethics?” Scientific Monthly 49, no. 4 (1939): 295–303 (p. 303). 26. C. Judson Herrick, “A Neurologist Makes Up His Mind,” Scientific Monthly 49, no. 2 (1939): 99–110 (p. 110). 27. Leake, “Ethicogenesis,” in Studies and Essays in the History of Science and Learning Offered in Homage to George Sarton on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, 31 August, 1944, ed. M. F. Ashley Montagu (New York: Henry Schuman, 1946), pp. 263–275.

28. Leake, “Ethicogenesis,” in Studies, 268–269.



29. Leake, “Ethicogenesis,” in Studies, 274, 271.

30. F. R. Moulton, “The Sixth Philadelphia Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Associated Socie­ties,” Science (ns) 93, no. 2406 (1941): 119–142 (p. 136).

31. On Allee, see Mitman, State of Nature.

32. W. C. Allee, “Where Angels Fear to Tread: A Contribution from General Sociology to ­Human Ethics,” Science (ns) 97, no. 2528 (1943): 517–525 (p. 521).

33. Allee, “Where Angels,” p. 521.

34. Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945 [1942]), p.  175. Montagu added passages on natu­ral co­ operation to the second edition. 35. Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, pp.  176–177. Such statements ­were repeated and elaborated in ­later editions of the book.

36. Montagu, Statement, pp. 128, 133.



37. Montagu, Statement, pp. 135, 136.



38. Quoted in “U.N.E.S.C.O’s New Statement on Race,” Man 51 (1951): 154–155 (p. 155).

39. Dobzhansky to Montagu, May 22, 1944, Ashley Montagu Papers, Correspondence, folder “Dobzhansky, Theodosius,” APS Library. On Montagu’s debate with Dobzhansky over the term race, see John P. Jackson Jr. and David Depew, Darwinism, Democracy and Race: American Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology in the Twentieth C ­ entury (New York: Routledge, 2017), esp. chapter 4.

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40. The editors of Man: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of ­Great Britain and Ireland published the text of the first Statement in October 1950 (vol. 50:138– 139) and invited comments from anthropologists. ­Those critiques ­were then published in subsequent issues in 1951 (vol. 51: January, April, May, June, July). See also “U.N.E.S.C.O.’s New Statement on Race,” Man 51 (Nov 1951): 154–155. 41. A. T. Carey, “Race,” Man 51 (July 1951): 103–104 (quote p. 103). A similar critique was made by H. J. Fleure, “U.N.E.S.C.O. on Race,” Man 51 (Jan 1951): 16; and by Kenneth ­Little, “U.N.E.S.C.O. on Race,” Man 51 (Jan 1951): 17–18. 42. L. C. Dunn was rapporteur. The provisional text of the second Statement appeared in Man 52 (Jun 1952): 90–91. The full text, along with criticisms, was published in Race Concept. The full text of the second Statement also appears in Montagu, Statement, 3rd ed. (1972), pp. 139–147. 43. “It is an awful waste of Ashley Montagu to have him teaching anatomy . . . ​when all my preparation and interests are calculated to achieve something fundamental in the social sciences.” Montagu to Sorokin, April 12, 1943, folder M-48, Ashley-­Montagu, IX Correspondence, Sorokin Papers, University of Saskatchewan Library, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (hereafter, Sorokin Papers). 44. Montagu to Dean Owen, December 9, 1948, Series I Rutgers University Correspondence, folder RU Correspondence 1948–9, Ashley Montagu Papers, APS Library. See also Montagu to Owen, May 31, 1949, folder RU Correspondence, 1948–9. 45. On Montagu’s short-­lived tenure at Rutgers, see Susan Sperling, “Ashley’s Ghost: McCarthyism, Science, and ­Human Nature,” in Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism, and the CIA, ed. Dustin M. Wax (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2008), pp. 17–36. 46. Montagu to Dean Owen, March  9, 1950, folder RU Correspondence 1950, APS Library. 47. Montagu to Dean Owen, August 14, 1951, folder RU Correspondence 1951, APS Library. 48. Montagu, “Man’s Social Appetite,” Saturday Review of Lit­er­a­ture, November 1949, and “Social Instincts,” Scientific American, April 1950. 49. ­These books w ­ ere Montagu, On Being H ­ uman (1950), and Montagu, Darwin: Com­ petition and Cooperation (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952). 50. Montagu to Stanley Hutchinson, April 6, 1950, folder RU Correspondence, 1950, APS Library. Hutchinson was executive director of the Davella Mills Foundation in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, a philanthropic venture established by the auto accessory manufacturer David Bloss Mills. See The Story of the Davella Mills Foundation, Created for the Purpose of Benefitting Mankind, 1935–1955 (Montclair, NJ: Davella Mills Foundation, 1957). 300

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51. Montagu, On Being ­Human, p. 54; emphasis original.



52. Montagu, On Being ­Human, p. 100.

53. Montagu to Solomon Dutka, January 20, 1950, folder RU Correspondence 1950, Montagu Papers, APS Library (emphasis original). On Dutka, see Dana Canedy, “Solomon Dutka, 75, Founder of Marketing Research Firm,” New York Times, August 12, 1999.

54. Montagu, Darwin, p. 96.

55. Einstein to Montagu, March 20, 1953, folder “Einstein, Albert,” Montagu Papers, APS Library. 56. The exchange took place in 1932 and was published in 1933 as a pamphlet called “Why War: A Correspondence between Professor Einstein and Professor Freud,” Informa­ tion Bulletin of the League of Nations Intellectual Co-­Operation Organ­ization 1 (Jan 1933): 239–245. It was ­later re-­published as Why War? The Correspondence between Albert Ein­ stein and Sigmund Freud (Chicago: Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1978).

57. Freud in Why War?

58. Montagu to Einstein, March  27, 1953, folder “Einstein, Albert,” Ashley Montagu papers, APS Library (emphasis original). 59. Montagu to Kenneth Rendell Gallery, undated letter [prob­ably 1989], folder “Einstein, Albert,” Ashley Montagu papers, APS Library. 60. Einstein to Montagu, September 30, 1953, folder “Einstein, Albert,” Ashley Montagu papers, APS Library. 61. This was the official name of the center in publications. Sorokin also sometimes referred to it as the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism. Montagu and Sorokin disagreed about the official name; see Montagu to Sorokin, June  13, 1952, and Sorokin to Montagu, June 17, 1952, IX Correspondence M-48 Ashley-­Montagu, Sorokin Papers. 62. On Sorokin’s early life, see Barry Johnston, Pitirim A. Sorokin: An Intellectual Biog­ raphy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995); and Joseph A. ­Matter, Love, Altruism and World Crisis: The Challenge of Pitirim A. Sorokin (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1974). See also the memoirs by his wife Elena and son Sergei on the website of the Pitirim Sorokin Institute, cliffst​.o ­ rg. 63. Pitirim Sorokin, A Long Journey: The Autobiography of Pitirim  A. Sorokin (New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1963), p. 14.

64. Sorokin, Long Journey, pp. 48–52.

65. Sorokin, Leaves from a Rus­sian Diary and Thirty Years ­After (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950 [1924]), p. 112. 301

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66. Sorokin, Leaves, p. 193.

67. On the Rus­sian Revolution, see N.  N. Sukhanov, The Rus­sian Revolution, 1917: A Personal Rec­ord (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); Richard Pipes, The Rus­sian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990); and John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (London: Penguin, 2007 [1919]). 68. Sorokin’s essay was “L. N. Tolstoy as a Phi­los­op ­ her,” 1912. On the influence of Tolstoy on Sorokin, see Lawrence T. Nichols, “Modern Roots of the Sociology of Love: Tolstoy, Addams, Gandhi, and Sorokin,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity, ed. Vincent Jeffries (New York: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 149–175, (esp. pp. 161–166); see also Nichols, “Sorokin, Tolstoy and Civilizational Change,” in Rough Dialectics: Sorokin’s Theory of Value, ed. Palmer Talbutt (Netherlands: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 32–38. 69. Tolstoy’s l­ater writings included The Kingdom of God Is within You: Chris­tian­ity Not as a Mystic Religion but as a New Concept of Life, trans. Constance Garnett (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984 [1894]).

70. Sorokin, Leaves, p. 162.



71. Sorokin, Leaves, p. 173.



72. Sorokin, Long Journey, p. 92.

73. Sorokin, Leaves, pp. 217–228, 283–284, 303–308. On the influence of Rus­sia on Sorokin, see Lawrence Nichols, “Sorokin as a Lifelong Rus­sian Intellectual: The Enactment of an Historically Rooted Sensibility,” American Sociologist 43, no. 4 (2012): 374–405. 74. On the Sociology Department at Harvard, see Lawrence Nichols, “The Establishment of Sociology at Harvard: A Case of Orga­nizational Ambivalence and Scientific Vulnerability,” in Science at Harvard University: Historical Perspectives, ed. Clark Elliott and Margaret Rossiter (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1992), pp. 191–222.

75. Sorokin, “Thirty Years ­After,” in Leaves, pp. 322, 334–335.

76. Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age: The Social and Cultural Outlook (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1941), pp. 312–314.

77. Sorokin, The Reconstruction of Humanity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), p. 103.



78. Sorokin, Reconstruction, p. 107.

79. Sorokin, Rus­sia and the United States, 2nd ed. (London: Stevens and Sons, 1950), preface and p. 174.

80. Sorokin, Leaves, p. 310.

81. Sorokin, “Integralism Is My Philosophy,” in This Is My Philosophy, ed. Whit Burnett (New York: Harper, 1957), pp. 179–189 (p. 188).

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82. Sorokin, Leaves, p. ix. On Sorokin’s philosophy of values, see Lawrence Nichols, “Science, Politics, and Moral Activism: Sorokin’s Integralism Reconsidered,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 35, no. 2 (1999): 139–155. See also Sorokin and Civilization: A Centennial Assessment, ed. Joseph  B. Ford, Michel  P. Richard, and Palmer  C. Talbutt (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995); and Pavel Krotov, “Pitirim Sorokin’s Heritage: From Core Ideas to Syntheses of Theory and Practice,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity, ed. Vincent Jeffries (New York: Palgrave Mac­ uman Society: The Contribu­ millan, 2014), pp. 123–147. See also Frank R. Cowell, Values in H tion of Pitirim A. Sorokin to Sociology (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1970); and Edward A. Tirya­ ree Press, kian, ed., Sociocultural Theory, Values, and Sociocultural Change (New York: F 1963).

83. Sorokin, “Thirty Years ­After” in Leaves, p. 346.

84. At the beginning of The Ways and Power of Love, Sorokin traced his belief in love as a life-­giving force to his experience being “hunted from pillar to post by the Rus­sian Communist government” in 1918. See Sorokin, “Preface,” in The Ways and Power of Love: Types, F ­ actors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954), p. vii. 85. On the reception of Sorokin’s work, see Lawrence T. Nichols, “Deviance and Social Science: The Instructive Historical Case of Pitirim Sorokin,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 25, no. 4 (1989): 335–355. 86. On the Harvard Department of Social Relations, see Lawrence Nichols, “Social Relations Undone: Disciplinary Divergence and Department Politics at Harvard, 1946– 1970,” American Sociologist 29, no. 2 (1998): 83–107. See also Joel Isaac, “Epistemic Design: Theory and Data in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations,” in Cold War Social Science, ed. Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 79–95; ­ uman Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Chicago: UniIsaac, Working Knowledge: Making the H versity of Chicago Press, 2012), esp. pp. 175–190; and Barry Johnston, “Sorokin and Parsons at Harvard: Institutional Conflict and the Origin of a Hegemonic Tradition,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 22, no. 2 (1986): 107–127. 87. On Eli Lilly, see James H. Madison, Eli Lilly: A Life (1885–1977) (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1989). Lilly had sent Sorokin a complimentary letter about The Crisis of Our Age, and Sorokin responded by suggesting an institute to study love. Lilly immediately offered to help fund the proj­ect. See Johnston, Pitirim  A. Sorokin, p.  175, and Nichols, “Pitirim Sorokin’s ‘Long Journey’ to Altruism: Integrating Science, Spirituality, and Ser­vice,” Heritage 1, no. 12 (2018): 125–143. 88. On the work of the Research Center, see Sorokin, “Studies of the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism,” in Pitirim A. Sorokin on the Practice of Sociology, ed. Barry Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 305–316. The so­cio­log­ i­cal lit­er­at­ure on the research activity of the center includes Jay Weinstein, “Creative

303

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­ ltruism: Restoring Sorokin’s Program of Applied Sociology,” Journal of Applied Sociology 17 A (2000): 86–117; Mitikuni Ohno, “Sorokin Revisited: The Fate of G ­ rand Theory or the Possibility of Cultural Sociology,” Memoirs of Kyoto Tachibana University 39 (2013): 1–18; Ursula King, “Theories of Love: Sorokin, Teilhard, and Tillich,” Zygon 39, no.  1 (2004): 77–102; Barry V. Johnston, “Integralism, Altruism, and Social Emancipation: A Sorokinian Model of Prosocial Be­hav­ior and Social Organ­ization,” Catholic Social Science Review 6 (2001): 41–55; ­ uture of Sociology: T ­ oward a Holistic SociVincent Jeffries, “Redefining the Nature and F ology,” Handbook of Public Sociology, ed. Vincent Jeffries (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), pp. 1–23; Jeffries, “Establishing and Building the Study of Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity as a Field of Specialization,” Altruism, Morality and Social Solidarity Forum: Newsletter of the AMSS Section of ASA 3, no. 2 (2012): 50–60; Jeffries, “Pitirim A. Sorokin’s Integralism and Public Sociology,” American Sociologist 36, no. 3–4 (2005): 66–87; Elvira del Pozo, ed., Integralism, Altruism and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of Pitirim  A. Sorokin (València: Universitat de València: Biblioteca Javier Coy d’Estudis Nord Americans, 2006); G. C. Hallen and R. Prasad, eds., Sorokin and Sociology: Essays in Honor of Pitirim A. Sorokin (Agra, India: Satish Book Enterprise, 1972). The center’s volumes include Altruistic Love: A Study of American Good Neighbors and Christian Saints (1950); Explorations in Altruistic Love and Be­hav­ior: A Symposium (1950); Social Philosophies of an Age of Crisis (1950); S.O.S.: The Meaning of Our Crisis (1951); Forms and Techniques of Altruistic and Spiritual Growth: A Sym­ posium (1954); The Ways and Power of Love (1954); and Power and Morality: Who ­Shall Guard the Guardians? (1954). 89. Sorokin, Ways and Power, p. viii. On Sorokin’s amitology, see Lawrence T. Nichols, “Modern Roots of the Sociology of Love: Tolstoy, Addams, Gandhi, and Sorokin,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity, ed. Vincent Jeffries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 149–175. 90. Sorokin, “Love: Its Aspects, Production, Transformation, and Accumulation,” in Explorations in Altruistic Love and Be­hav­ior: A Symposium, ed. Sorokin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), p. 23.

91. Sorokin, “Love,” pp. 15, 16, 17.



92. Sorokin, Ways and Power, p. 65.

93. For a similar present-­day claim, see Natalie Angier, “Wired to Be Besties,” New York Times, April 17, 2018. This article, however, includes no reference to Sorokin and his work.

94. Sorokin, Ways and Power, pp. 47–79.

95. Sorokin, Altruistic Love: A Study of American “Good Neighbors” and Christian Saints (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), p. 201. See also Sorokin and Robert C. Hanson, “The Power of Creative Love,” in The Meaning of Love, ed. Ashley Montagu (New York: Julian Press, 1953), pp. 97–159.

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96. Sorokin, Reconstruction, p. 79. Sorokin portrayed his two favorite altruists, Jesus and Saint Francis, as intensely emotional.

97. Sorokin, Altruistic Love, pp. 201, 211.



98. Sorokin, “Preface,” in Explorations, p. v.



99. Sorokin, “Preface,” in Ways and Power, p. ix.

100. M. F. Ashley Montagu, “The Crisis of Our Age by P. A. Sorokin,” Isis 35, no. 1 (1944): 46–47. 101. Sorokin to Montagu, December 15, 1948, folder “Sorokin, Pitirim, A.” Series I Correspondence, Montagu Papers, Manuscript Collection 109, APS Library. 102. Montagu to Sorokin, December 17, 1948, folder M-48 Ashley Montagu, IX Correspondence, Sorokin Papers. 103. Sorokin included Montagu’s essay “The Origin and Nature of Social Life and the Biological Basis of Cooperation: A Symposium” in his edited volume Explorations in Altru­ istic Love and Be­hav­ior, pp.  74–92. Montagu included Sorokin and Hanson’s essay “The Power of Creative Love” in his edited volume The Meaning of Love, pp. 97–159. 104. Montagu to Sorokin, February 14, 1949, folder “Sorokin, Pitirim, A.,” Montagu Papers, APS Library. This study was ­later incorporated into Montagu’s 1971 volume Touching: The ­Human Significance of the Skin (New York: Harper and Row). 105. Montagu to Sorokin, February  14, 1949, and June  10, 1949, folder “Sorokin, Pitirim A.,” Montagu Papers, APS Library. 106. Montagu to Sorokin, March 2, 1949, folder Sorokin, Pitirim A., Montagu Papers, APS Library. 107. Sorokin to Montagu, January 17, 1950, folder Sorokin, Pitirim A., Montagu Papers, APS Library, and Sorokin to Montagu, May 8, 1952, folder M-48 Ashley-­Montagu, IX Correspondence Sorokin Papers. 108. Montagu to Sorokin, May  3, 1954, folder M-48 Ashley-­Montagu, IX Correspondence, Sorokin Papers. 109. Sorokin to Montagu, November 20, 1950, Folder Sorokin, Pitirim A., Montagu Papers, APS Library. 110. See Sorokin, Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1956). On Sorokin’s critique of social science, see Andrew Jewett, Science ­Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), p. 135.

111. Montagu to Sorokin, May 9, 1952, folder M-48 Ashley-­Montagu, Sorokin Papers.

305

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112. Montagu to Sorokin, May  10, 1956, folder Sorokin, Pitirim  A., Montagu Papers, APS Library. 113. Montagu, “The Natu­ral Superiority of W ­ omen,” Saturday Review, March 1, 1952, pp.  8–9 and 27–29. See also the Letters to the Editor in response, Saturday Review, March  22, 1952, pp.  23–25. Montagu’s book The Natu­ral Superiority of ­Women was published in May 1952; by 1953 it was in its third printing (New York: Macmillan). 114. Montagu, “Natu­ral Superiority,” p.  9. On the history of the female chromosome, see Sarah S. Richardson, Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the H ­ uman Genome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 115. In the Annotated Reading List in the Natu­ral Superiority of W ­ omen, Montagu called Bowlby’s Maternal Care and ­Mental Health “a fundamental book” (p. 197).

116. Montagu, “Natu­ral Superiority,” p. 27.



117. Montagu, “Natu­ral Superiority,” p. 28.

118. Montagu, “Natu­ral Superiority,” p.  29. On Soviet feminism, see Paula Erizanu, “The Revolutionary Sex,” Aeon, May 31, 2018. 119. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1953), p.  267. Montagu approved of Beauvoir’s contention that ­women should be freed from inferiority myths but not of Beauvoir’s recommendation that ­women outsource childrearing to the community. See “A SR [Saturday Review] Panel Takes Aim at ‘The Second Sex,’ ” Saturday Review, February 21, 1953, pp. 28–29.

120. Montagu, “Natu­ral Superiority,” p. 29.

121. Florence Kitchelt to Montagu, March 4, 1952. Series III folder “The Natu­ral Superiority of W ­ omen, Correspondence,” MS Coll 109, American Philosophical Society Library. 122. See Kitchelt to Montagu, September 5, 1953. Series III folder “The Natu­ral Superiority of ­Women, Correspondence,” MS Coll 109, American Philosophical Society Library. Montagu took his self-­perception as a feminist so much for granted that he was surprised and hurt when feminists criticized his arguments; see Montagu letter to John Osmundsen, July 10, 1988, box 40 Correspondence, Montagu Papers. 123. Marjorie Child Husted to Montagu, September 1, 1952. See also Husted to Montagu, December 3, 1952. Series III folder “The Natu­ral Superiority of W ­ omen, Correspondence,” MS Coll 109, American Philosophical Society Library. Montagu thanked Husted for her support in the preface to The Natu­ral Superiority of ­Women (1953). 124. Sophie Drinker to Montagu, March 6, 1952. Series III folder “The Natu­ral Superiority of ­Women, Correspondence,” MS Coll 109, American Philosophical Society Library. 306

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125. Sonia Pressman to Montagu, April 3, 1963. Series III folder “The Natu­ral Superiority of ­Women, Correspondence,” MS Coll 109, American Philosophical Society Library. President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act on June 10, 1963. See “John F. Kennedy, the 35th  President,” American Presidency Proj­ect, http://­www​.­presidency​.­ucsb​.­edu​ /­ws​/­​?p ­ id​=9 ­ 267. 126. Marie Miller to Montagu, March 17, 1951 [misdated, actually 1952]. Series III folder “The Natu­ral Superiority of W ­ omen, Correspondence,” MS Coll 109, American Philosophical Society Library. 127. Gayle Campbell to Montagu, December 4, 1959. Series III folder “The Natu­ral Superiority of ­Women, Correspondence,” Montagu Papers, APS Library. 128. Montagu, “The Triumph and Tragedy of the American W ­ oman,” Saturday Review, September  27, 1958, pp.  13–15, 34–35. On Montagu’s views of w ­ omen, see Marga Vicedo, The Nature and Nurture of Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 70–81. On ­women’s popu­lar magazines and their conflicting images of ­women, see Joanne Meyero­ witz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture,” Journal of American History 79 (1993): 1455–1482. 129. For a collection of his short popu­lar essays, see Montagu, The American Way of Life (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons 1967 [1952]). 130. Montagu to S. Stanfield Sargent, September  25, 1954, box “Media Appearances—­ TV,” folder “Tele­ vi­ sion Appearances Correspondence 1954–1973,” Series IV, Montagu Papers, APS Library. 131. See box “Media Appearances—­TV,” Folder “Tele­vi­sion Appearances Correspondence 1954–1973,” Series IV, Montagu Papers, APS Library.

132. On Montagu’s public image, see Sperling, “Ashley’s Ghost,” in Anthropology, p. 21.

133. B. J. Hawkins to Montagu [fan postcard], January 27, 1958, box “Media Appearances—­TV,” folder “Tele­vi­sion Appearances Correspondence 1954–1973,” Series IV, Montagu Papers, APS Library. 134. Mrs. Corinne F. Lindale to Montagu January 4, 1962, box “Media Appearances— TV,” folder “Tele­vi­sion Appearances Correspondence 1954–1973,” Series IV, Montagu Papers, APS Library. 135. Milo Hopkins to Harry Derby, January 8, 1953, folder “Rutgers University Correspondence, 1952–1981,” Montagu Papers, APS Library. 136. Derby to Jones, January 12, 1953, and Jones to Derby, Jan 16, 1953. Folder “Rutgers University Correspondence, 1952–1981,” Montagu Papers, APS Library. 137. Jones to Montagu, June 17, 1954, folder “RU Correspondence, 1952–1981,” Montagu Papers, APS Library. 307

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138. Montagu to Jones, June 21, 1954, folder “RU Correspondence, 1952–1981,” Montagu Papers, APS Library. 139. Montagu to Jones, March 16, 1955, folder “RU Correspondence, 1952–1981,” Montagu Papers, APS Library. On anti-­Communist attacks on academia, see Ellen  W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). On Montagu’s surveillance by the FBI, see Sperling, “Ashley’s Ghost,” in Anthropology, pp.  18–19 and 26, and David  H. Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), pp.  277–283. Sorokin was similarly an object of FBI suspicion; see Mike Forrest Keen, Stalking the So­cio­log­i­cal Imagination: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Surveillance of American Soci­ ology (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), pp. 105–121. 140. Owen to Jones, March 17, 1955, folder “RU Correspondence, 1952–1981,” Montagu Papers, APS Library. 141. Ashley Montagu writing as Academicus Mentor, Up the Ivy: Being Microcosmo­ graphia Academica Revisited, a True Blue Guide on How to Climb in the Academic World Without Appearing to Try (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966), p. 13. 142. Montagu quoted by Ardrey in a letter to R. J. Politzer, August 17, 1961, Robert Ardrey Collection, box 2, folder “African Genesis Correspondence, May  31, 1961–­Sept. 1, 1961,” Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. 143. Ardrey to Ashley Montagu, June  29, 1969, Ashley Montagu Papers, Manuscript Collection 109, Series I Correspondence, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, PA. 144. That is, Montagu would be hired as an adjunct and paid only if he taught a course; Montagu declined the offer. See Fox to Montagu, May 21, 1969, folder RU Correspondence, 1952–1981, Montagu Papers, APS Library. 145. In The Invisible Encounter (New York: Scribner, 1947), Sikorsky quotes from and relies on Sorokin. Sikorsky, however, saw the spiritual crisis and its resolution in racial terms: “Inner forces of true life, this divine flame in the hearts of men, may . . . ​save the situation and even prevent the impending downfall of the white race” (p.  119). On Sikorsky (1889–1972), see The Story of the Winged S: An Autobiography (New York: Dodd Mead, 1938). See also Igor  I. Sikorsky, The Message of the Lord’s Prayer (New York: Scribner, 1942). 146. Tentative Plan of the Research Society on Creative Altruism, March 1, 1956, folder 15 “Tentative Plans and Suggestions,” box 27, XI Research Center for Creative Altruism, Administrative Files, Sorokin Papers. 147. The Research Society’s membership included Melvin Arnold, director of the Beacon Press; Bowditch, adviser to MIT president; Vermont Senator Ralph Flanders; Duncan Howlett, Unitarian minister of the First Church of Boston; Fritz Kunz, vice presi308

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dent of Foundation for Integrated Education; psychologist Abraham Maslow; Filmer S. C. Northrup, Yale professor of philosophy and law; James Houston Shrader (Waterville, VT); Jacob L. Moreno, a psychiatrist who pioneered psychodrama as a treatment for ­mental illness; physicist Henry Margenau; and Swami Akhilananda, a Hindu mystic of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society of Boston. The businessmen on its council, in addition to Sikorsky and Wright, included Harry Culbreth (vice president of Nationwide Insurance) and Thomas Reid (director of civic affairs of the Ford Motor Com­pany). The society was part of a larger effort in the 1950s on the part of business to increase its involvement with religion, spirituality, and ethics (see Notes on the Research Society, April 11, 1958, Sorokin Papers). On the use of Maslow’s humanistic psy­chol­ogy in business schools, see Kira Lussier, “Of Maslow, Motives, and Man­ag­ers: The Hierarchy of Needs in American Business, 1960– 1985,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 55, no. 4 (2019): 319–341. 148. On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, see Maslow, “A Theory of H ­ uman Motivation,” Psychological Review 50 (1943): 370–396. On the “instinctoid” aspect of needs, see Maslow, “The Instinctoid Nature of Basic Needs,” in Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1954), pp. 77–95. On Maslow, see Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psy­ chol­ogy: Po­liti­cal Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 269–275; Ian A. M. Nicholson, “ ‘Giving Up Maleness’: Abraham Maslow, Masculinity, and the Bound­aries of Psy­chol­ogy,” History of Psy­chol­ogy 4, no. 1 (2001): 79–91; Weidman, “Between the Counterculture and the Corporation: Abraham Maslow and Humanistic Psy­ chol­ogy in the 1960s,” in Groovy Science, ed. David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 109–141.

149. Maslow, “Instinctoid Nature,” in Motivation, p. 82.

150. On self-­actualization, see “Self-­Actualizing P ­ eople: A Study of Psychological Health,” in Motivation, pp. 149–180. 151. Sorokin to Maslow, January 8, 1952, and Maslow to Sorokin, nd, in folder M-22, Maslow, A.H., Sorokin Papers. 152. See Maslow, The Psy­chol­ogy of Science: A Reconnaissance (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1966). See also Boris Kožnjak, “Kuhn Meets Maslow: The Psy­chol­ogy ­behind Scientific Revolutions,” Journal of General Philosophy of Science 48 (2017): 257–287. 153. See Swami Akhilananda, Spiritual Practices: Memorial Edition with Reminiscences by His Friends, ed. Alice May Stark and Claude Alan Stark (Cape Cod, MA: Claude Stark, 1974). 154. Swami Akhilananda, Hindu Psy­chol­ogy: Its Meaning for the West (New York: Harper and ­Brothers, 1946). 155. See Swami Tathagatananda, Journey of the Upanishads to the West (Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 2005), pp. 542–543. Sorokin’s interest in Hinduism and in nonviolence was shared by Tolstoy; see pp. 523–535. 309

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156. Swami Akhilananda, “Technique of Emotional Development and Integration,” in Explorations of Altruistic Love and Be­hav­ior: A Symposium (Boston: Beacon, 1950), pp. 301–311. Swami Akhilananda, Modern Prob­lems and Religion (Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1964). 157. See Shrader’s recollection of Akhilananda, pp. 197–199, in Akhilananda, Spiritual Practices. 158. This first meeting took place August  9, 1957, at Harvard Business School. See folder “Minutes of Meetings, 1955–1961,” Sorokin Papers. 159. Sorokin to James Houston Shrader, March 26, 1957, folder S-26 Shrader, IX Correspondence, Sorokin Papers. 160. Speakers at the conference included, in addition to Sorokin, psychologists Allport and Maslow, and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm; biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy; ge­ne­ticist Theodosius Dobzhansky; artist and architect Gyorgy Kepes; phi­los­o­pher Daisetz Suzuki, a former Buddhist monk; economist Walter Weisskopf; mathematician and phi­los­op ­ her of science Jacob Bronowski; physicist Henry Margenau; phi­los­o­pher Robert Hartman; anthropologist Dorothy Lee; neurologist and psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein; and theologian and phi­ los­o­pher Paul Tillich. See the Conference Program for “Conference on New Knowledge in ­Human Values,” folder 12, “Research Society-­Proposal,” box 27, XI Research Center for Creative Altruism, Administrative Files, Sorokin Papers.

161. Conference Program, Sorokin Papers.



162. “A Scientific Look at Values Sought,” New York Times, October 5, 1957.



163. Bowditch, Plans for Institute, folder B-29 Bowditch, Sorokin Papers.



164. Sorokin to Shrader, March 27, 1956, folder S-26 Shrader, Sorokin Papers.

165. Sorokin to Bowditch, nd (prob­ably May  1957), folder B-29 Bowditch, Sorokin Papers.

166. Sorokin to Shrader, June 3, 1958, folder S-26 Shrader, Sorokin Papers.

167. Sorokin, “The Mysterious Energy of Love,” Main Currents in Modern Thought 15, no. 1 (1958): 3–7 (quotes on p. 7). 168. Montagu, The ­Human Revolution (New York: Bantam, 1965), p. 122.

169. Montagu, ­Human Revolution, p. 155.

170. Montagu, Touching.

171. Montagu, Touching, p. 402.

172. On the turn to emotions in the ­human sciences in the immediate postwar period and during the Cold War, see Marga Vicedo, “Cold War Emotions: ­Mother Love and the 310

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War over H ­ uman Nature,” in Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal De­ mocracy, and H ­ uman Nature, ed. Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 233–249; and Susan Lanzoni, Empathy: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). On Cold War rationality see Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange C ­ areer of Cold War Rationality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

5. The Aggression Debate Epigraph: Konrad Lorenz, “Introduction,” in Studies in Animal and ­Human Behaviour, vol. 1, trans. Robert Martin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. xii. 1. Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative (New York: Atheneum, 1966), pp. 30–31. Ardrey portrays Montagu as a follower of John  B. Watson, the behaviorist, and of Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau’s conception of man’s “original goodness,” which Ardrey treats as synonymous with environmentalism.

2. Ardrey, Territorial Imperative, p. 21.

3. The quote continues, “­because every­thing he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture, from the man-­made part of the environment, from other h ­ uman beings.” M. F. Ashley Montagu, “The New Litany of ‘Innate Depravity,’ or Original Sin Revisited,” in Man and Aggression, ed. M.  F. Ashley Montagu (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 9. The same quote appears in Montagu’s The ­Human Revolution (New York: Bantam Books, 1967 [1965]), p. 118. 4. Mark Greif, Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in Amer­ic­ a, 1933–1973 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015) argues that a discourse of “man” (often said to be in “crisis”) arose in direct response to the horrors of World War II and expanded during the Cold War; by the late 1960s, this discourse fractured, as the resurgence of racial and gender difference revealed the fault lines in the concept of universal “man.” Greif does not locate a similar discourse of “man” arising among biological and social scientists, even though he refers to the discourse as a “fundamental anthropology”; his subjects are mainly po­liti­cal figures, fiction writers, and phi­los­op ­ hers. 5. Joseph Alsop, “The Way of an Aggressor” [review of On Aggression], New Yorker, September 10, 1966, pp. 209–222 (quote p. 209). 6. Roger Masters, “Modern Man’s Ancient Instincts” [review of Territorial Impera­ tive], Saturday Review, September  17, 1966, pp.  34–35. Charles Deemer, “Jeopardy and Alibi,” [review of On Aggression and Territorial Imperative] New Republic, October 1, 1966, pp. 26–30. 7. Masters, “Modern Man’s Ancient Instincts,” p. 35. Marston Bates, “How Did We Get This Way?” [review of On Aggression], New York Times Book Review, June  19, 1966. 311

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Bates was more critical in “Aggression,” in A Jungle in the House: Essays in Natu­ral and Un­ natural History (New York: Walker and Com­pany, 1970), pp. 138–147.

8. Deemer, “Jeopardy,” quotes p. 28.

9. Arthur Koestler, “Of Geese and Men” [review of On Aggression], The Observer (London), September 18, 1966, p. 26. 10. Oscar Handlin, “Ethology” [review of On Aggression and Territorial Imperative], The Atlantic, September 1966, pp. 138–140 (quote p. 138). 11. Howard Evans, “Biology: The New Salvation of Man” [review of On Aggression and Territorial Imperative], Harper’s Magazine, September 1966, pp. 107–108 (quotes p. 107). 12. Peter M. Driver, “­Toward an Ethology of ­Human Conflict” [review of On Aggres­ sion, Territorial Imperative, African Genesis, and ­Human Be­hav­ior], Journal of Conflict Reso­ ­ uman being lution 11, no. 3 (1967): 361–374 (quote p. 368). Montagu had asserted that “the h is entirely instinctless” in The ­Human Revolution, p. 120.

13. Alsop, “Way of an Aggressor,” p. 219.



14. Driver, “­Toward an Ethology,” p. 367.



15. Evans, “Biology,” p. 108.



16. Masters, “Modern Man’s Ancient Instincts,” p. 34.

17. Guy Davenport, “Homo Territorialis” [review of Territorial Imperative], National Review, November 1, 1966, pp. 1115–1117 (quote p. 1117).

18. Review of The Territorial Imperative, Time, September 16, 1966, p. 127.

19. Loren Eiseley, “A Script Written in the Bones” [review of Territorial Imperative], New York Times Book Review, September 11, 1966, p. 6. Ardrey kept meticulous track of the reviews and responded to negative ones. See for example the exchange of letters on “The Origins of War” (New York Times, October 22, 1967), in which Ardrey disputed Sally Carrighar’s assertion that he and Lorenz believed war was “in our genes.” In response Carrighar apologized for oversimplifying their views. 20. E. R. [Eugene Rabinowitch], “The Editor Comments: Open Letter to Konrad Lorenz,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 22, no. 9 (1966): 2–3 (quote p. 3). 21. One of the most critical reviews of the two books was Theodosius Dobzhansky’s in Animal Be­hav­ior 15 (1967): 392–393. The ge­ne­ticist dismissed Ardrey as unworthy of comment ( just as Montagu feared would happen) and criticized Lorenz’s claim that man was “a species saddled with a biological disharmony.” Yet Dobzhansky also helped to preserve Lorenz’s reputation, depicting the ethologist’s interest in humanity as “an extracurricular activity” cleanly separable from his scientific work, which was above reproach (p. 393). 312

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22. Margaret Mead, “Review of On Aggression,” Redbook Magazine, November 1966, pp. 34–40, (quotes p. 40). 23. Niko Tinbergen, “Instinct Parliament” [review of On Aggression], The Listener, November 17, 1966, p. 736. Tinbergen took the same tack in “On War and Peace in Animals and Man,” Science (ns) 160, no. 3835 (1968): 1411–1418. On Tinbergen’s own transition from the study of animal to ­human be­hav­ior in the 1960s and 1970s, see Marga Vicedo, “The ‘Disadapted’ Animal: Niko Tinbergen on H ­ uman Nature and the H ­ uman Predicament,” Journal of the History of Biology 51, no 2 (2018): 191–221.

24. Montagu, ­Human Revolution, pp. 112–119.

25. Montagu to John Paul Scott, April 12, 1967, box “Man and Aggression,” Ashley Montagu Papers, MC 109, American Philosophical Society Library (hereafter APSL). 26. Montagu to John Hurrell Crook, December 14, 1967, box “Man and Aggression,” APSL. 27. Henry Raymont, “Scientists Oppose Man-­Is-­Bad View,” New York Times, September 15, 1968, p. 60. 28. The group was the New York Friends Group, which established the Center for War / Peace Studies in New York City in 1966 and “took over publication of the War / Peace Report, which had begun in­de­pen­dently in 1961.” See Center for War / Peace Studies Collected Rec­ ords 1966–2005, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, https://­www​ .­swarthmore​.­edu​/ l­ ibrary​/­peace​/­CDGA​.­A​-­L​/­CWPS​.­htm 29. B. F. Skinner, “The Phylogeny and Ontogeny of Be­hav­ior,” Science 153, no. 3741 (1966): 1205–1213. On the reputation of Skinner’s behaviorism in twentieth-­century Amer­ i­ca, see Alexandra Rutherford, Beyond the Box: B. F. Skinner’s Technology of Be­hav­ior from Laboratory to Life, 1950s–1970s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 30. Fredric Wertham, A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of ­Human Vio­lence (New York: Macmillan, 1966). Critical reviews of Wertham’s book include Eliot Fremont-­Smith, “We Are Not Alone,” New York Times, September 19, 1966, p. 41; and Leonard Berkowitz, “Readiness or Necessity?” Con­temporary Psy­chol­ogy 12, no. 12 (1967): 580–582 (p. 582). 31. On Margaret Mead’s views ­after World War II, see Peter Mandler, Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), and Paul Shankman, The Trashing of Margaret Mead (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).

32. Montagu to T. C. Schneirla, July 3, 1967, box “Man and Aggression,” APSL.

33. Montagu’s other omissions are less readily explicable. He also failed to include a trenchant critique of Lorenz’s theory of aggression and reliance on the psycho-­hydraulic model of instinct by Robert Hinde, “The Nature of Aggression,” New Society 9, no.  231 (1967): 302–304. 313

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34. Montagu, “Introduction” and “The New Litany of Innate Depravity, or Original Sin Revisited,” in Man and Aggression (1968), pp. 10, xiii, viii. 35. Crook, “The Nature and Function of Territorial Aggression,” in Man and Aggres­ sion (1968), pp. 141–142. 36. Crook, “Nature and Function,” in Man and Aggression (1968), pp. 141–143. Like Crook, Sahlins also apprehended Ardrey’s populist appeal and felt the difficulty and irony of opposing such a position: “Who wants to be accused of being a counter-­revolutionary? . . . ​ What an improbable position for an anthropological critic” (Marshall D. Sahlins, “African Nemesis: An Off-­Broadway Review,” in Man and Aggression [1968], p. 117). 37. Montagu, “New Litany,” in Man and Aggression (1968), pp.  9, 15. In an article in May 1968 (announcing Man and Aggression and rehearsing his arguments in slightly dif­fer­ent form), we can see Montagu’s belief in cooperative drives in the pro­cess of dissolving. The article pre­sents a ­middle position, neither biologically based “cooperative drive” nor yet full “flexibility.” See Montagu, “Is Man Born as Mean as He Is?” Washington Post, May 19, 1968, p. B1.

38. Montagu, “New Litany,” in Man and Aggression (1968), p. 8.



39. Montagu, “Introduction,” in Man and Aggression (1968), p. xii–­xiii.

40. Montagu, “Introduction” and “New Litany,” in Man and Aggression (1968), quotes pp. 9, xi.

41. Montagu, “New Litany,” in Man and Aggression (1968), p. 6.



42. Boulding, “Am I a Man or a Mouse—or Both?” in Man and Aggression (1968), pp. 87, 88.



43. Leach, “­Don’t Say ‘Boo’ to a Goose,” in Man and Aggression (1968), p. 72.



44. Leach, “­Don’t Say ‘Boo,’ ” p. 66.

45. Gorer, “Ardrey on ­Human Nature: Animals, Nations, Imperatives,” in Man and Ag­ gression (1968), p. 78.

46. S. A. Barnett, “On the H ­ azards of Analogies,” in Man and Aggression (1968), p. 21.

47. Schneirla’s critique appears on p. 63, Crook’s on pp. 153–158, Man and Aggression (1968).

48. Cf. Dobzhansky’s review in Animal Be­hav­ior 15.



49. Carrighar, “War Is Not in Our Genes,” in Man and Aggression (1968), pp. 43, 44, 46.



50. J. P. Scott, “That Old-­Time Aggression,” in Man and Aggression (1968), pp. 52, 55.



51. Boulding, “Am I a Man,” in Man and Aggression, p. 84.

52. Leach, “­Don’t Say ‘Boo,’ ” in Man and Aggression, p. 65. Sahlins’ contribution, “African Nemesis,” a spoof of African Genesis written in the form of a play, also emphasizes the 314

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contrast between Ardrey and real scientists. At the climax of the action, the scientists “Raymond Blunt” (a stand in for Dart) and “Dr. L. Faucet” (Louis Leakey) betray their erstwhile leader “Robert Ardent,” a bombastic “former playwright.” At the end Ardent retreats to Broadway shouting “West Side Story! Life follows Art!” while Blunt and Faucet walk out on him in disgust (Man and Aggression [1968], pp. 139–140). 53. Roger D. Masters, “Of Nature and Nurture” [review of Man and Aggression], Sat­ urday Review, October 19, 1968. Other reviews also noted the volume’s uneven aspect; see Alex Comfort, “Irrationally ­Human,” The Guardian, January 31, 1969; “Dog Eating Dog,” Times Literary Supplement, June  19, 1969; Jerome Brama, “Man and Aggression,” Psy­ chol­ogy ­Today, September 1969.

54. Gorer, “Ardrey,” in Man and Aggression (1968), p. 82.



55. Boulding, “Am I a Man,” in Man and Aggression (1968), p. 89.

56. Ralph Holloway, “Territory and Aggression in Man: A Look at Ardrey’s Territorial Imperative,” in Man and Aggression (1968), pp. 101–102.

57. Boulding, “Am I a Man,” in Man and Aggression, pp. 99, 89–90.



58. Montagu to Leach, April 19, 1967, box “Man and Aggression,” APSL.



59. Schneirla to Montagu, June 19, 1967, box “Man and Aggression,” APSL.



60. Montagu to Schneirla, June 20, 1967, box “Man and Aggression,” APSL.



61. Schneirla to Montagu, August 29 1967, box “Man and Aggression,” APSL.



62. Barnett to Montagu, October 5, 1967, box “Man and Aggression,” APSL.



63. Montagu undated note, box “Man and Aggression,” APSL.

64. Joseph Alsop, “Profiles: A Condition of Enormous Improbability,” New Yorker, March 8, 1969, pp. 39–93; Walter ­Sullivan, “The ­Family, to Lorenz, Is All,” New York Times, January  22, 1970, p.  39; “A Talk with Konrad Lorenz: Rats, Apes, Naked Apes, Kipling, Instincts, Guilt, the Generations, and Instant Copulation,” New York Times, July  5, 1970, p. 121. 65. Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the ­Human Animal (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967), p. 39.

66. Morris, Naked Ape, p. 241.



67. Montagu to Crook, December 28, 1967, box “Man and Aggression,” APSL.

68. To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility: Final Report of the National Commission on the ­Causes and Prevention of Vio­lence (Milton S. Eisenhower, Chairman), (Washington, DC: GPO, 1969), p. xv. 69. To Establish Justice, p. 28. 315

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70. To Establish Justice, p. xxxii. 71. Harvey Segal, “Pent­house Interview: Robert Ardrey,” Pent­house 5, no.  11 (1971): 28–33 (pp. 29–30). 72. “Psychological Aspects of Foreign Policy,” Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate, 91st Congress, 1st Session, June 5, 19, and 20, 1969 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1969).

73. “Psychological Aspects,” p. 1.



74. “Psychological Aspects,” pp. 43, 67, 136.

75. Richard J. Barnet, Roots of War (New York: Atheneum, 1972), p. 5. Barnet was an official in the State Department during the Kennedy administration and an advocate of arms control and disarmament; see “An Interview with Richard J. Barnet,” SAIS Review 18, no 1 (1973): 10–14.

76. Barnet, Roots of War, p. 6.

77. Konrad Lorenz, Studies in Animal and H ­ uman Behaviour, vols. 1 and 2, trans. Robert Martin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970, 1971). Published in Munich in 1970–1971 by R. ­Piper as Über Tierisches und Menschliches Verhalten. Volume 1 includes papers from 1931 to 1942 (omitting t­ hose with any taint of Nazism), volume 2 from 1941 to 1963. Robert Martin was a student of Tinbergen and had also studied with Lorenz at Seewiesen.

78. Lorenz, Studies, vol. 1 (quotes pp. xii, xiii, xx).



79. Lorenz, “Introduction,” in Studies, vol 1, p. xiii.

80. Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York: Rinehart, 1942). Philip Wylie (1902–1971) wrote for the New Yorker and worked for publishing ­houses in the 1920s, then moved to Hollywood to write movie scripts for Paramount and MGM. In the late 1940s, as a special adviser to the American Museum of Natu­ral History, he helped establish a field station of the museum in Bimini, the Bahamas. See “Philip Wylie, 69, a Critic of ‘Momism,’ ” Newsday, October 26, 1971; “Author Philip Wylie Dies at Age 69,” Chicago Tribune, October 26, 1971; J. Y. Smith, “Philip Wylie Dies; Assailed ‘Momism,’ ” Washington Post, October 26, 1971. See also Lewis Nichols, “Talk with Philip Wylie,” New York Times, February 21, 1954. On Wy­ entury of lie’s critique of “Momism,” see Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents: A C Strug­gle with Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Vicedo, Nature and Nurture of Love, pp. 32–33. 81. Wylie, An Essay on Morals: A Science of Philosophy and a Philosophy of the Sciences; a Popu­lar Explanation of the Jungian Theory of H ­ uman Instinct; a New Bible for the Bold Mind and a Way to Personal Peace by Logic; the Heretic’s Handbook and Text for Honest Skeptics, Including a Description of Man Suitable for an Atomic Age, Together with a Com­ pendium of Means to Brotherhood in a Better World; and a Voyage beyond the Opposite 316

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Directions of Religion and Objective Truth to Understanding (New York: Rinehart and Com­ pany, 1947). 82. Wylie, Essay on Morals, xii. Breit quotes Wylie as saying “The basis of morality . . . ​ is instinct. T ­ here are two checks I have, two questions I ask myself. Do animals do it? And then I ask, supposing every­body did it?” Breit, “Talk with Philip Wylie,” New York Times, July 3, 1949.

83. Philip Wylie, The Magic Animal (New York: Pocket Books, 1968).



84. Wylie, Magic Animal, p. 60.



85. Wylie, Magic Animal, pp. 26–27.



86. Wylie, Magic Animal, quotes pp. 82, 40, 46.

87. The two ­were introduced to each other by Wylie’s ­daughter, Karen Wylie Pryor (b. 1932). Pryor, trained as a marine biologist, also made ethological studies of albatross be­ hav­ior, work that brought her into contact with Lorenz in the 1960s. In 1968 Pryor put Lorenz in touch with her f­ather and sent Lorenz a copy of The Magic Animal. Karen Wylie Pryor to Lorenz, May 23, 1968, Philip Wylie Papers, box 199, folder 2, Rare Books and Special Collections, Prince­ton University (hereafter PWP). See also “Profile: Karen Wylie Pryor,” The Authors Guild, https://­www​.­authorsguild​.­net​/­services​/­members​/1­ 032.

88. Wylie to Lorenz, August 24, 1968, PWP.



89. Wylie to Lorenz, March 21, 1969, PWP.



90. Lorenz to Wylie, January 27, 1969, PWP.



91. Wylie to Lorenz, March 28, 1969, PWP.



92. Lorenz to Wylie, January 27, 1969, PWP.

93. Lorenz and Wylie fi­nally met in person at the Lerner Marine Laboratory in Bimini in January and February of 1970. See Lerner Marine Laboratory Newsletter 2, no. 2 (1970) for a report of Lorenz’s visit, PWP. 94. Daniel  S. Lehrman, “Semantic and Conceptual Issues in the Nature-­Nurture Prob­lem,” in Development and Evolution of Be­hav­ior, ed. L. Aronson, E. Tobach, D. Lehrman, and J. Rosenblatt (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1970), pp. 17–52 (pp. 21–22).

95. Lehrman, “Semantic,” in Development, p. 31.



96. Lorenz, “Introduction,” in Studies, vol. 2, p. xviii.



97. Lorenz, “Introduction,” in Studies, vol. 2, p. xviii.

98. Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 201, 241; for the discussion of Lord of the Flies, see pp. 204–209. Golding’s 1954 novel had been made into a film in 1963. 317

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99. Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, The Imperial Animal (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 221. 100. Elaine Morgan, The Descent of ­Woman (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), pp. 159, 161. 101. On Morgan, see Erika Lorraine Milam, “Elaine Morgan Obituary,” The Guardian, July 29, 2013, https://­www​.­theguardian​.c­ om​/ ­books​/­2013​/­jul​/­29​/e­ laine​-­morgan. 102. Naomi Weisstein, “Psy­chol­ogy Constructs the Female, Or the Fantasy Life of the Male Psychologist with Some Attention to the Fantasies of His Friends, the Male Biologist and the Male Anthropologist” (1968), https://­www​.­cwluherstory​.­org​/­conscious​/­psychology​ -­constructs​-­the​-f­ emale. The article was published in the Journal of Social Education 35 (1971): 362–373 and in an expanded form as Kinder, Küche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psy­chol­ogy Constructs the Female (Boston: New E ­ ngland F ­ ree Press, 1968). On Weisstein, see Laura Ball, “Profile of Naomi Weisstein” (2010, updated 2015), in Psy­chol­ogy’s Feminist Voices Multimedia Internet Archive, ed. Alexandra Rutherford, https://­feministvoices​.c­ om​/­profiles​ /­naomi​-w ­ eisstein​/­.

103. Weisstein, “Psy­chol­ogy.”

104. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine Books, 1969).

105. Lionel Tiger, “Male Dominance? Yes, Alas. A Sexist Plot? No,” New York Times Magazine, October 25, 1970. 106. Lila Leibowitz, “Desmond Morris Is Wrong about Breasts, Buttocks, and Body Hair,” Psy­chol­ogy T ­ oday 3, no. 9 (1970): 16–22 (p. 16). 107. Evelyn Reed, “Is Man an ‘Aggressive Ape’?” (1970), Evelyn Reed (1905–1979), Marxists Internet Archive, https://­www​.­marxists​.­org​/­archive​/­reed​-­evelyn​/1­ 970​/­aggressive​ -­ape​.­htm. Reed’s article originally appeared in International Socialist Review 31, no. 8 (1970): 27–31 and 40–42.

108. Reed, “Is Man an ‘Aggressive Ape’?”

109. Montagu, Man and Aggression, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Three essays from the original edition w ­ ere dropped: one by Geoffrey Gorer, as well as ­those by John Beatty and Solly Zuckerman. An article by Hermann Helmuth on the Ute replaced Beatty’s contribution. 110. Pilbeam, “An Idea We Could Live Without: The Naked Ape,” in Man and Aggres­ sion (1973), quotes pp. 116, 119–120, 117.

111. Helmuth, “­Human Be­hav­ior: Aggression,” in Man and Aggression (1973), p. 103.

112. Berkowitz, “­Simple Views of Aggression,” in Man and Aggression (1973), quotes pp. 45–46, 40, 41.

318

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113. See Leonard Berkowitz, “Aggressive Cues in Aggressive Be­hav­ior and Hostility Catharsis,” Psychological Review 71, no.  2 (1964): 104–122; Berkowitz and Russell  G. Geen, “Film Vio­lence and the Cue Properties of Available Targets,” Journal of Personality and Social Psy­chol­ogy 3, no. 5 (1966): 525–530; and Berkowitz and Anthony LePage, “Weapons as Aggression-­Eliciting Stimuli,” Journal of Personality and Social Psy­chol­ogy 7, no.  2 (1967): 202–207. See also Berkowitz, Aggression: A Social Psychological Analy­sis (New York: McGraw Hill, 1962).

114. Hunt, “Man and Beast,” in Man and Aggression (1973), quotes pp. 33, 25, 37.



115. Klopfer, “From Ardrey to Altruism,” in Man and Aggression (1973), p. 72.

116. Dubos, “Man’s Nature, and Social Institutions,” in Man and Aggression (1973), quotes pp. 88, 89, 91. 117. Leon Eisenberg, “The ­Human Nature of ­Human Nature,” in Man and Aggression (1973), p. 67. Eisenberg’s essay was originally published in Science in April 1972.

118. Eisenberg, “­Human Nature,” in Man and Aggression (1973), p. 55.



119. Eisenberg, “­Human Nature,” in Man and Aggression (1973), p. 58.

120. “Three Behavioral Science Pioneers Win Nobel Prize for Medicine,” New York Times, October 12, 1973, p. 1. 121. Walter ­Sullivan, “Questions Raised on Lorenz’s Prize,” New York Times, December 15, 1973, p. 9. 122. “Scientist Regrets Brief Support of Nazi Views,” Los Angeles Times, December 8, 1973, p. 20. 123. Lorenz, “Analogies as Sources of Knowledge,” Nobel Prize Address, December 12, 1973, Nobelprize​.o ­ rg: http://­www​.­nobelprize​.­org​/­mediaplayer​/­index​.­php​?­id​=­1582. 124. Wallace Cloud, “Winners and Sinners,” The Sciences 13, no.  10 (1973): 16–21 (pp. 18, 19).

125. Mead quoted in Cloud, “Winners and Sinners,” p. 19.

126. Montagu quoted in Cloud, “Winners and Sinners,” p. 20. In 1978 the historian Theodora  J. Kalikow substantiated Lorenz’s Nazi sympathies in “Konrad Lorenz’s ‘Brown Past’: A Reply to Alec Nisbett,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 14, no. 2 (1978): 173–180. For historical work since then on Lorenz’s Nazism, see references in chapter  1. The extent to which Lorenz’s Nazism corrupted his scientific work  is still being reevaluated; in 2015 the University of Salzburg withdrew Lorenz’s honorary doctorate ­because of his Nazi past: see https://­www​.­neweurope​.­eu​/­wires​ /­a ustrian​-­u niversity​-­strips​-­n obel​-­p rize​-­w inner​-­konrad​-­l orenz​-­o f​- ­d octorate​-­d ue​-­t o​ -­nazi​-­past​/­.

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127. Konrad Lorenz, Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins, trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), pp. x, xii. 128. Lorenz’s claim resembles that of the ecologist John  B. Calhoun, who demonstrated the detrimental effects of overcrowding in lab rats; see Calhoun, “Population Density and Social Pathology,” Scientific American 206, no. 2 (1962): 139–149. Although Lorenz did not cite Calhoun, Morris did in Naked Ape (p. 210) and Ardrey did in The Social Con­ tract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder (New York: Atheneum, 1970; pp. 261–218). On Calhoun, see Edmund Ramsden, “From Rodent Utopia to Urban Hell: Population, Pathology, and the Crowded Rats of NIMH,” Isis 102, no.  4 (2011): 659–688.

129. Lorenz, Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins, pp. 30, 41.

130. Lorenz, Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins, pp. 44, 45, 55, 57, 66.

131. Lorenz, Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins, pp. 86, 87.

132. Marga Vicedo argues persuasively that Lorenz’s postwar pronouncements about motherhood w ­ ere “a socially acceptable way to recast his eugenic fears”; see “The ­Father of Ethology and the Foster ­Mother of Ducks,” Isis 100, no. 2 (2009): 263–291 (p. 287). 133. Elizabeth Hall, “The Short Po­liti­cal Aberration of Konrad Lorenz,” Psy­chol­ogy ­Today 8, no. 6 (1974): 84–85 (p. 84). The article accompanied excerpts from interviews with Lorenz conducted by Richard  I. Evans (pp.  82–93  in the same issue), ­later published in book form as Konrad Lorenz: The Man and His Ideas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975).

134. Hall, “Short Po­liti­cal Aberration,” pp. 84–85.

135. Bruce Chatwin, “The Education of Konrad Lorenz,” Atlas World Press Review 22, no. 6 (1975): 21–24.

136. Chatwin, “Education,” pp. 22–23.



137. Chatwin, “Education,” p. 24.

138. See Robert Claiborne, “Man the Peaceable Primate,” Horizon 15, no.  2 (1973): 32–37 (p. 33). 139. Peckinpah quoted in Montagu, The Nature of ­Human Aggression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 31. 140. Montagu, Nature, p. 11.

141. Montagu, Nature, p. 61.

142. Montagu, Nature, quotes pp. 140, 158, 184, 192, 64. Montagu argued against the blank slate in private correspondence as well. In a 1972 letter to Leon Eisenberg, Mon-

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tagu wrote, “My conclusion is that man has an inbuilt value system oriented in the direction of growth and development in the ability to love, to work, and to play, determined by natu­ral se­lection. . . . ​The evidence indicates that man is born to live as if to live and to love ­were one” (Montagu to Eisenberg, April 20, 1972, box 2, 4, “Man and Aggression,” APSL). 143. Montagu, Nature, p. 78. Montagu’s 1971 book Touching: The ­Human Significance of the Skin (New York: Harper and Row) provides further evidence that he was not a blank slater. H ­ ere he argued for the importance of tactile contact (from breastfeeding through old age) to normal h ­ uman development and functioning. The biological need was integrated with the appropriate environment: a natu­ral need that required a certain type of nurture for fulfillment. See also Marga Vicedo, Nature and Nurture of Love: From Im­ printing to Attachment in Cold War Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), esp. pp. 78–81. 144. Montagu, Nature, quotes pp. 286–287, 265, 233–234, 240, 123. Montagu’s religious meta­phor traveled well beyond his own writings; a critique of Lorenz, Ardrey, and Morris by the anthropologist Sally Binford was titled “Apes and Original Sin,” ­Human Be­hav­ior (Nov / Dec 1972): 65–72.

145. Montagu, Nature, quotes pp. 296, 291, 48, 298.

146. Montagu, Nature, p. 298. 147. Montagu debated Shockley in person at Prince­ton University on December  4, 1973. He decimated Shockley’s claims and mercilessly ridiculed his opponent’s pedantic style and tendency ­toward paranoia. When a microphone in the room malfunctioned, Montagu deadpanned, “Perhaps Dr. Shockley thinks it’s a bomb,” and the room erupted in laughter. (My thanks to William H. Tucker for a copy of this audiotape in his possession.) Shockley’s campaign was underwritten by a segregationist multimillionaire, Wickliffe Preston Draper; see Tucker, The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pio­ neer Fund (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). See also Montagu, ed., Race and IQ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 148. Ardrey, The Hunting Hypothesis: A Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolu­ tionary Nature of Man (New York: Atheneum, 1976).

149. Ardrey, Hunting Hypothesis, pp. 65, 67, 71.

150. Lorenz, ­Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natu­ral History of H ­ uman Knowledge (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977; German ed., Munich: ­Piper, 1973).

151. Lorenz, ­Behind the Mirror, pp. 40–42.



152. Ardrey, Hunting Hypothesis, p. 206; also 227.



153. Montagu, Nature, p. 87.

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6. Sociobiology and Pop Ethology Epigraph: Sherwood L. Washburn, “­Human Be­hav­ior and the Be­hav­ior of Other Animals,” in Sociobiology Examined, ed. Ashley Montagu (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 254. 1. The details of Wilson’s biography are drawn from Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994). On the Society of Fellows, see pp. 144–146; on Lorenz’s lecture, pp. 285–287. See also Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr., Patterns of Be­hav­ior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 461–462.

2. Wilson, Naturalist, p. 15.

3. On the fire ant, see Wilson, Naturalist, pp. 115–117; on Wilson’s 1953 trip to the tropics, pp. 147–157. On the history of myrmecol­ogy, see Charlotte Sleigh, Six Legs Better: A Cultural History of Myrmecol­ogy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

4. Wilson, Naturalist, pp. 285–286.



5. Wilson, Naturalist (quotes p. 287; emphasis original), p. 286.

6. See Wilson, Naturalist, pp.  287–288. See also Wilson, “A Chemical Releaser of Alarm and Digging Be­hav­ior in the Ant Pogonomyrmex badius (Latreille),” Psyche 65, nos. 2–3 (1958): 41–51; Wilson, N. I. Durlach, and L. M. Roth, “Chemical Releasers of Necrophoric Be­hav­ior in Ants,” Psyche 65, no.  4 (1958): 108–114; Wilson, “Source and Pos­si­ble Nature of the Odor Trail of Fire Ants,” Science 129, no. 3349 (1959): 643–644. 7. Man and Beast: Comparative Social Be­hav­ior, J. F. Eisenberg and Wilton S. Dillon, eds. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971), p. 7.

8. J. F. Eisenberg, “Acknowledgements,” in Man and Beast, p. 13 (p. 6).

9. Participants included the ethologists John Hurrell Crook and Detlev Ploog, a collaborator of Lorenz’s; William  D. Hamilton, the mathematical population ge­ne­ticist; the anthropologists Irven DeVore, Robin Fox, and Margaret Mead; the phi­los­o­pher Susanne Langer; and the psychologist Julian Jaynes. 10. Edward  O. Wilson, “Competitive and Aggressive Behavior,” in Man and Beast, pp. 181–218 (p. 201).

11. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, p. 201.



12. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast (quotes pp. 183–184).



13. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, p. 184.



14. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, p. 188.



15. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, pp. 187–190.

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16. David Barash makes a similar contrast in Sociobiology and Be­hav­ior (New York: Elsevier, 1977), pp. 6 and 8.

17. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, p. 190.



18. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, pp. 198–199.



19. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, p. 200.



20. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, p. 208.



21. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, p. 201.



22. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, p. 208.

23. Robert Ardrey, The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 195.

24. Ardrey, Social Contract, pp. 257–258.



25. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, p. 211.

26. Both Wright and Segerstråle assert that the main difference between ethology and sociobiology was the former’s embrace of group se­lection and the latter’s rejection of it. Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psy­chol­ogy and Everyday Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), pp. 238, 55. Ullica Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth: The ­Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (New York: Oxford, 2000), p. 54. Wilson, however, never wholly rejected group se­lection, even in his sociobiology proj­ect. L ­ ater in his ­career he endorsed it even more openly. See Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Liveright, 2012); Martin A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, and E. O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Eusociality,” Nature 466 (2010): 1057–1062; David S. Wilson and E. O. Wilson, “Survival of the Selfless,” New Scientist 3 (2007): 42–46; and David S. Wilson and E. O. Wilson, “Evolution ‘for the Good of the Group,’ ” American Scientist 96 (Sept / Oct 2008): 380–389. On the debate about Wilson’s changing views about kin se­lection, group se­lection, and the evolution of altruism, see Jonah Lehrer, “Kin and Kind: A Fight about the Ge­ne­tics of Altruism,” New Yorker, February 27, 2012.

27. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, p. 199.

28. See V. C. Wynne-­Edwards, Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962). On Wynne-­Edwards’ concept of group se­lection, see Mark Borrello, Evolutionary Restraints: The Contentious History of Group Se­lection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); see also Borrello, “Dogma, Heresy, and Conversion: Vero Copner Wynne-­Edwards’s Crusade and the Levels-­of-­Selection Debate,” in Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology, ed. Oren Harman and Michael Dietrich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 213–230

29. Ardrey, Social Contract, p. 194.

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30. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, p. 188, and Ardrey, Social Contract, p. 196.



31. Ardrey, Social Contract, p. 324.



32. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, p. 209.



33. Ardrey, Social Contract, pp. 363–364.



34. Ardrey, Social Contract, p. 13.



35. Ardrey, Social Contract, p. 364.

36. See Hamilton, “The Ge­ne­tical Theory of Social Be­hav­ior, I and II,” Journal of Theo­ retical Biology 7 (1964): 1–16, 17–32; and Robert  L. Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology 46, no. 4 (1971): 35–57. 37. This is Ullica Segerstråle’s insight, on which I am building. See Segerstråle, De­ fenders, p. 97. 38. Edward  O. Wilson, The Insect Socie­ties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

39. Wilson, Insect Socie­ties, p. 318.

40. Haploid means containing only one copy of each chromosome, inherited from only one parent, in this case, the ­mother. Diploid means containing two copies of each chromosome, one from each parent. 41. Wilson, Insect Socie­ties, p. 328. As he pointed out in Sociobiology: The New Syn­ thesis (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000 [1975]), a “drone” (a male insect) designates in En­glish “any lazy, parasitic person” (p. 416). A corollary of this point is that females, who are related to their male offspring 100 ­percent, often compete with each other over which of them gets to lay the male (unfertilized) eggs. See Hamilton, “Ge­ne­tical Theory” (1964); Ullica Segerstråle, Nature’s Oracle: The Life and Work of W. D. Hamilton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. pp. 164–172. On Hamilton, see Sarah A. Swenson, “ ‘From Man to Bacteria’: W. D. Hamilton, the Theory of Inclusive Fitness, and the Postwar Social Order,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biometrical Sciences 49 (2015): 45–54; and Swenson, “ ‘Morals Cannot Be Drawn from Facts but Guidance May Be’: The Early Life of W. D. Hamilton’s Theory of Inclusive Fitness,” British Journal for the History of Science 48, no. 4 (2015): 543–563.

42. Wilson, Insect Socie­ties, p. 382.



43. Wilson, Insect Socie­ties, p. 336.



44. Wilson, Insect Socie­ties, p. 342.



45. Wilson, Insect Socie­ties, p. 334.



46. Wilson, Insect Socie­ties, p. 458.

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47. Wilson, Insect Socie­ties, p. 460. The biblical quote is from Proverbs 6:6–8.

48. Wilson, Insect Socie­ties, p. 458. On the use of the hypothetico-­deductive method as a means for evolutionary biology to achieve mature scientific status, see Michael  T. Ghiselin, The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); and Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982). On the emergence, maturation, and institutionalization of evolutionary biology as the science of life, see Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1996). 49. Max Hall, Harvard University Press: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p.  141. See also Mark Carroll (director of Harvard University Press) to E.  O. Wilson, August  11, 1970, “Harvard University Press, 1968–1971,” Wilson Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter WPLC). 50. See original dust jacket, “Harvard University Press, 1968–1971,” WPLC. Harvard published Mayr’s Animal Species and Evolution (1963) and Populations, Species, and Evolu­ tion (1970); Karl von Frisch’s Dance Language and Orientation of Bees (1967); and Lorenz’s Studies in Animal and ­Human Be­hav­ior (1970–1971). 51. Caryl P. Haskins, “Review of The Insect Socie­ties, by Edward O. Wilson,” New York Times Books Review, March 19, 1972, p. 3.

52. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 577.

53. Paul Vitello, “Arthur Rosenthal, Academic Book Publisher, Dies at 93,” New York Times, July 8, 2013.

54. Hall, Harvard University Press, p. 202.



55. Hall, Harvard University Press, pp. 201–202.

56. Boyce Rensberger, “Sociobiology: Updating Darwin on Be­hav­ior,” New York Times, May 28, 1975.

57. See New York Times, July 27, 1975, p. E6.

58. Gail Jennes, “Sociobiology Is a New Science with New Ideas on Why We Sometimes Behave Like Cavemen,” ­People, November 17, 1975; and Caroline Seebohm, “Getting Back to Nature—­Our Hope for the F ­ uture: A Provocative Interview with Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson,” House and Garden 148 (1976): 65.

59. Wilson, “The Meaning of Life,” New York Times, November 27, 1977.

60. Nina McCain, “Do Genes Rule Our Lives? Harvard’s E. O. Wilson, Despite Critics, Believes They Do,” Boston Globe, November 5, 1978. See also McCain, “Sociobiology: New Theory on Man’s Motivation,” Boston Globe, July 13, 1975.

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61. Wilson, “Slavery in Ants,” Scientific American 232, no. 6 (1975): 32–40 (p. 36).



62. Wilson, “­Human Decency Is Animal,” New York Times Magazine, October 12, 1975.

63. On the history of the evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s, see Smocovitis, Unifying Biology. On the rise of population ge­ne­tics, see William B. Provine, The Ori­ gins of Theoretical Population Ge­ne­tics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). The term “evolutionary synthesis” was first used by Julian Huxley in Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: Allen and Unwin, 1942). 64. On the integration of dif­fer­ent biological disciplines into the synthesis, see Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine, The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

65. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 4.

66. Wilson to Miss Margaret Ann Roth, May  28, 1974, “Harvard University Press, 1972–74,” WPLC.

67. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 4.



68. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 3.

69. The phrase “gene’s-­eye view” comes from Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, in “Preface,” 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989 [1976]), p. xv. 70. Wilson actually reused exactly the same words: “When the same par­ameters and quantitative theory are used to analyze both termite colonies and troops of rhesus macaques, we ­will have a unified science of sociobiology” (Sociobiology, p. 4, and The Insect Socie­ties, p. 458).

71. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 4.



72. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 109.



73. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 113.



74. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 114.



75. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 116.



76. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 299.



77. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 129.

78. ­These are Ernst Mayr’s terms. See Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 45–47. 79. The many charts and t­ ables in Sociobiology display this variability in graphic form. Landry’s drawings, depicting animals in their natu­ral habitats engaging in a range of be­ hav­iors, reinforce the idea of variability. By contrast, Berdine Ardrey’s drawings in African 326

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Genesis and Territorial Imperative are portraits of individual animals or groups of twos or threes. Konrad Lorenz’s whimsical drawings in King Solomon’s Ring also lack the emphasis on variability across an animal group. On the artwork in Sociobiology, see Greg Myers, “­Every Picture Tells a Story: Illustrations in E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology,” ­Human Studies 11, nos. 2–3 (1988): 235–269.

80. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 144.



81. Wilson, Sociobiology, pp. 26–27.



82. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 6.



83. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 6.



84. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 27.



85. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 29.

86. Wilson, Sociobiology, p.  4. Tinbergen objected to the “rather pronounced ‘scientism’ ” of Wilson’s book; see Tinbergen, “Review of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by Edward O. Wilson,” New Humanist, October 1975.

87. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 547.



88. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 313.



89. Wilson, Sociobiology, pp. 254–255, 317–318.



90. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 297, 320, 286–287.



91. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, p. 201, and Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 255.



92. Wilson, “Competitive,” in Man and Beast, p. 208.

93. Wilson borrowed the term “biogram” from Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, The Impe­ rial Animal (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 6. The term was coined by the anthropologist Earl W. Count in “The Biological Basis of ­Human Sociality,” American An­ thropologist 60 (1958): 1049–1058. Tiger and Fox also relied on Noam Chomsky’s notion of the deep structure of language, the universal grammar on which all par­tic­ul­ ar grammars rest (see Imperial Animal, p.  13). Wilson also cites Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957), and Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1972). 94. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 548. Note that Wilson begins chapter 27 in distinctively Lorenzian mode: “Let us now consider man in the ­free spirit of natu­ral history, as if we ­were zoologists from another planet” (p. 547). In On Aggression, Lorenz had taken the detached perspective of “an unprejudiced observer from another planet” in making his predictions about the ­human f­ uture (p. 46).

95. Wilson, Sociobiology, quotes pp. 550–551. 327

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96. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 555.

97. “­Human beings are absurdly easy to indoctrinate—­they seek it” (Wilson, Sociobi­ ology, p. 562; emphasis original).

98. Wilson, Sociobiology, pp. 572–573.



99. Wilson, Sociobiology, pp. 562, 575.

100. Elizabeth Allen, Barbara Beckwith, Jon Beckwith, Steven Chorover, and David Culver et al., “Against ‘Sociobiology,” New York Review of Books, November 13, 1975. Gould, Lewontin, and Hubbard ­were among the sixteen signatories on this letter, the first salvo in the sociobiology debate. 101. See the correspondence between Robert Ardrey and E. O. Wilson, in folder “Ardrey, Robert, 1969–1980,” WPLC.

102. Wilson, “The Lyric Poet of Evolution,” Saturday Review, April 3, 1976, pp. 27–28.



103. Wilson, “Lyric Poet,” p. 28.



104. Ardrey to Wilson, March 2, 1976, “Ardrey, Robert” correspondence, WPLC.



105. Wilson to Ardrey, October 20, 1975, “Ardrey, Robert” correspondence, WPLC.



106. Ardrey to Wilson, December 12, 1976, “Ardrey, Robert” correspondence, WPLC.

107. Wilson to Ardrey, December  30, 1976, “Ardrey, Robert” correspondence, WPLC (emphasis original).

108. Ardrey to Wilson, January 7, 1977, “Ardrey, Robert” correspondence, WPLC.



109. Wilson to Ardrey, March 8, 1978, “Ardrey, Robert” correspondence, WPLC.



110. Wilson, On ­Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).



111. Wilson, ­Human Nature, pp. 97, 164.



112. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 99.



113. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 119.



114. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 162.



115. Wilson, ­Human Nature, pp. 79–80.



116. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 80.



117. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 119.



118. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 125.



119. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 109.

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120. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 125.

121. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 81.



122. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 167.



123. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 196.

124. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 80.

125. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 119.

126. Wilson, ­Human Nature, pp. 199, 198.

127. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 205.

128. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 206.

129. Wilson, ­Human Nature, p. 203.

7. Genes and Gender Epigraph: Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifin, and Barbara Fried, with the collaboration of Vicki Druss and Susan Leigh Star, ­Women Look at Biology Looking at ­Women: A Collection of Feminist Critiques (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1979), p. xx. 1. The papers from the symposium w ­ ere published as Sociobiology: Beyond Na­ ture / Nurture? edited by George Barlow and James Silverberg (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980). 2. On the Sociobiology Study Group, see Ullica Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth: The ­Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Neil Jumonville, “The Cultural Politics of the Sociobiology Debate,” Journal ­ eople, see Kelly Moore, of the History of Biology 35, no. 3 (2002): 569–593. On Science for the P Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945–1975 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2009), esp. chapter 6; Moore, “Organ­ izing Identity: The Creation of Science for the ­People,” in Social Structure and Organ­izations Revisited, ed. Marc Ventresca and Michael Lounsbury (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1996); Sigrid ­ eople: Documents from Schmalzer, Daniel  S. Chard, and Alyssa Botelho, Science for the P Amer­i­ca’s Movement of Radical Scientists (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 2018), esp., “Introduction” and chapter 5. 3. The exchanges consisted of the following. Elizabeth Allen, Barbara Beckwith, Jon Beckwith, Steven Chorover, and David Culver, et  al., “Against ‘Sociobiology,’ ” New York Review of Books, November 13, 1975. Wilson’s reply was “For Sociobiology,” New York Re­ view of Books, December  11, 1975. See also, Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the ­People [hereafter SSG], “Dialogue: The Critique: Sociobiology: Another Biological Determinism,” BioScience 26, no.  3 (1976): 182, 184–186. Wilson’s reply was “Dialogue: The 329

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­Response: Academic Vigilantism and the Po­liti­cal Significance of Sociobiology,” BioScience 26, no. 3 (1976): 183, 187–190. See also, SSG, “Sociobiology: Tool for Social Oppression,” Sci­ ence for the ­People, March 1976, pp. 7–9 (p. 9). Wilson’s reply was a Letter to the Members of Science for the ­People, Science for the ­People, May 1976, p. 33.

4. Wilson, On ­Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).

5. Nearly ­every account of the sociobiology controversy—­news report, participants’ memoir, or history—­retells the story of Wilson’s dousing at the AAAS. Accounts include Boyce Rensberger, “Theory That Genes Affect Be­hav­ior Evokes Vehement Clash at Parley,” New York Times, February 16, 1978; Jon Beckwith and Bob Lange, “AAAS: Sociobiology on the Run,” Science for the ­People, March-­April 1978, pp. 38–39; Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994), pp. 347–350; Jon Beckwith, Making Genes, Making Waves: A Social Activist in Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p.  147; Segerstråle, Defenders, pp.  22–24; Erika Milam, Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for ­Human Nature in Cold War Amer­ic­ a (Prince­ton , NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2019), pp. 258–259. My own retelling of the story draws from ­these accounts, which differ slightly from one another on details. 6. Segerstråle (Defenders, p. 24) also indicates that ­there ­were ties and perhaps even overlapping membership between INCAR and the SSG.

7. Wilson, Naturalist, pp. 347–350; Beckwith and Lange, “AAAS,” p. 38.

8. For a popu­lar account of the debate that deploys t­ hese images, see Nina McCain, “Do Genes Rule Our Lives? Harvard’s E.  O. Wilson, Despite Critics, Believes They Do,” Boston Globe, November 5, 1978, p. A1. See also, “Why You Do What You Do: Sociobiology: A New Theory of Be­hav­ior,” Time (August 1, 1977), which represents the critics as Sahlins, Lewontin, and Gould. 9. The talks at this symposium ­were published in Genes and Gender: II: Pitfalls in Research on Sex and Gender, ed. Ruth Hubbard and Marian Lowe (New York: Gordian Press, 1979). 10. Jumonville notes that, according to Sociobiology Study Group meeting minutes, Hubbard attended only one meeting of the SSG (p. 574n). In 1979, Salzman, writing in Sci­ ence for the ­People magazine, lamented that Wilson’s “claims for a biological basis for sex differences in be­hav­ior—­and sex roles—­have not caused protest” (“Sociobiology: The Con­ eople, March-­April 1979, pp. 20–27, p. 24). On the martroversy Continues,” Science for the P ginalization of w ­ omen and feminism by Science for the P ­ eople, see Schmalzer et al., Sci­ ence for the ­People, pp. 3, 111–113; and Moore, Disrupting Science, pp. 183–184. 11. Boyce Rensberger, “Sociobiology: Updating Darwin on Be­hav­ior,” New York Times, May 28, 1975, p. 1. 12. Richard H. Gilluly, “Sociobiology: The Cheerful Science,” Baltimore Sun, June 7, 1975, p. A18. 330

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13. Nina McCain, “Sociobiology: New Theory on Man’s Motivation,” Boston Globe, July 13, 1975, p. A1. 14. C.  H. Waddington, “Mindless Socie­ties” [review of Sociobiology and Bioge­ne­tic Structuralism], New York Review of Books, August 7, 1975. 15. Elizabeth Allen, Barbara Beckwith, Jon Beckwith, Steven Chorover, and David Culver, et al., “Against ‘Sociobiology,’ ” New York Review of Books, November 13, 1975. This letter reiterates many of the same criticisms made in a book review of Sociobiology—­ “Sociobiology: The Skewed Synthesis,” by “The Ge­ne­tic Engineering Group”—in Science for the P ­ eople, November 1975, pp. 28–30. The New York Review of Books letter had sixteen signatories, including Gould, Hubbard, and Lewontin. 16. Arthur Jensen, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement,” Har­ vard Educational Review 39, no. 1 (1969): 1–123; William Shockley, “Negro IQ Deficit: Failure of a Malicious Coincidence Model Warrants New Research Proposals,” Review of Educa­ tional Research 41 (1971): 245. On Jensen and Shockley, see William Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), and Tucker, The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).

17. Allen et al., “Against ‘Sociobiology.’ ”



18. Wilson, “For Sociobiology.”



19. Wilson, “For Sociobiology.”

20. Quoted in “ ‘No Questions’ Policy Blocks Discussion of Wilson’s Theories,” Har­ vard Crimson, December  5, 1975; see also “Slander Charges,” Harvard Crimson, December 10, 1975.

21. Wilson quoted in Harvard Crimson, December 10 and December 5, 1975.

22. SSG, “Dialogue: The Critique: Sociobiology: Another Biological Determinism,” BioScience 26, no. 3 (1976): 182, 184–186.

23. SSG, “Dialogue,” p. 182.

24. E.  O. Wilson, “Dialogue: The Response: Academic Vigilantism and the Po­liti­cal Significance of Sociobiology,” BioScience 26, no. 3 (1976): 183, 187–190 (p. 189).

25. Wilson, “Dialogue,” pp. 183, 189, 190.



26. Wilson, “Dialogue,” pp. 189.



27. Wilson, quoting Noam Chomsky, “Dialogue,” p. 190.

28. SSG, “Sociobiology: Tool for Social Oppression,” Science for the ­People, March 1976, pp. 7–9 (p. 9).

331

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29. Wilson, Letter to the Members of Science for the P ­ eople, Science for the ­People, May 1976, p. 33.

30. SSG, “A Response,” Science for the ­People, May 1976, pp. 33, 41 (p. 41).

31. Stephen Jay Gould, “Biological Potentiality vs. Biological Determinism,” in Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natu­ral History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), pp. 257–258. On Gould, see Michael Shermer, “Stephen Jay Gould as Historian of Science and Scientific Historian, Popu­lar Scientist and Scientific Pop­ul­ar­izer,” Social Studies of Science 32, no. 4 (2002): 489–524; and Myrna Perez Sheldon, “The Public Life of Scientific Orthodoxy: Stephen Jay Gould, Evolutionary Biology, and American Creationism, 1965–2002,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014. 32. Boyce Rensberger, “The Politics in a Debate over Sociobiology: The Basic Ele­ ments of the Argument Are Not New,” New York Times, November 9, 1975.

33. On Arditti, see https://­ritaarditti​.­com, and Moore, Disrupting Science, p. 183.

34. Rita Arditti, “­Women’s Biology in a Man’s World,” Science for the ­People, July 1973, pp. 39–42 (p. 400). 35. Rita Arditti, “­Women as Objects: Science and Sexual Politics,” Science for the ­People, September 1974, pp. 8–11, 29–32 (p. 31). 36. S. Alper, J. Beckwith, S. L. Chorover, et al., “The Implications of Sociobiology,” Sci­ ence, n.s., 192, no. 4238 (1976): 424, 426–428 (p. 424). 37. SSG, “A Response,” Science for the P ­ eople, May 1976 (p. 41). A second scathing review of the film was by Tedd Judd, “Naturalizing What We Do: A Review of the Film Sociobiology: ­Doing What Comes Naturally,” Science for the P ­ eople, Jan-­Feb 1978, pp. 16–19. 38. Barbara Chasin, “Sociobiology: A Sexist Synthesis,” Science for the P ­ eople, May-­ June 1977, pp. 27–31. 39. Doris O’Donnell, “An Open Letter to E. O. Wilson,” Science for the ­People, Sept-­Oct 1977, p. 26. 40. R. C. Lewontin, “Sociobiology: A Caricature of Darwinism,” Philosophy of Science Association 2 (1976): 22–31 (p. 23). 41. Gould, “The Nonscience of H ­ uman Nature,” in Ever Since Darwin, pp.  237–242 (p. 242). 42. Eleanor Leacock, “Social Be­hav­ior, Biology, and the Double Standard” (pp. 465– 488) and Stephanie Shields, “Nineteenth C ­ entury Evolutionary Theory and Male Scientific Bias” (pp. 489–504, p. 489), in Sociobiology: Beyond Nature / Nurture? 43. Carol Axelrod and Ruth Crocker, “The Natu­ral Birth of a ­Woman’s Group,” Science for the ­People, September 1974, p. 15. 332

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44. See Moore, Disrupting Science, pp. 183–184.

45. The Ge­ne­tic Engineering Group [an early alternate name for the SSG], “Book Re­ eople, November  1975, view: Sociobiology: The Skewed Synthesis,” Science for the P pp. 28–30 (p. 28).

46. Ge­ne­tic Engineering Group, “Book Review,” p. 30.

47. SSG, “Sociobiology: Tool for Social Oppression,” Science for the ­People, March 1976, pp. 7–9 (p. 9). 48. SSG, “Sociobiology: A New Biological Determinism,” in Biology as a Social Weapon, ed. Ann Arbor Science for the P ­ eople Editorial Collective (Minneapolis: Burgess, 1977), pp. 133–149 (p. 133).

49. SSG, “Sociobiology,” in Biology, p. 139.



50. Gar Allen, Letter, Science for the ­People, Nov-­Dec 1976, p. 27.



51. Allen, Letter, p. 27.



52. Ruth Hubbard and Rita Arditti, Letters, Science for the ­People, Jan-­Feb 1977, p. 5.



53. Hubbard, Letter, p. 5.



54. Arditti, Letter, p. 5.



55. Arditti quoted in Moore, Disrupting Science, p. 184.

56. On Hubbard’s life and ­career, see Ruth Hubbard and Margaret Randall, The Shape of Red: Insider / Outsider Reflections (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1988). See also Bryan Marquard, “Ruth Hubbard, 92, First ­Woman Tenured in Biology at Harvard,” Boston Globe, September 4, 2016; Sara Corbett, “Ruth Hubbard, b. 1924,” New York Times Magazine, December 21, 2016; Hubbard, “Reflections on My Life as a Scientist,” Radical Teacher, January 1986, pp. 3–7; and Jennifer Light, “Ruth Hubbard, 1924–­,” box 5, folder 8, “Chronological Correspondence, Apr-­ Oct 1995, includes S. Freud,” Ruth Hubbard Papers, MC 735, Schlesinger Library [hereafter RHP].

57. Hubbard and Randall, Shape of Red, pp. 118–119.



58. Hubbard and Randall, Shape of Red, p. 119.



59. Hubbard and Randall, Shape of Red, pp. 67–68, 95–96, 120.

60. Ruth Hubbard to Sophie Freud, December 15, 1988, box 2, folder 1, “Alphabetical Correspondence, Sophie Freud, 1980–94, n.d.,” RHP. Freud was a grand­daughter of Sigmund Freud and a professor of social work at Simmons College at the time of this letter; she and Hubbard had been childhood friends in Vienna and renewed their friendship in the 1980s. 61. Ruth Hubbard to Sophie Freud, September 6, 1989, box 2, folder 1, “Alphabetical Correspondence, Sophie Freud, 1980–94, n.d.,” RHP. 333

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62. Hubbard to Freud, December 15, 1988, RHP.



63. Hubbard and Randall, Shape of Red, p. 120.



64. Hubbard and Randall, Shape of Red, p. 121.

65. Margaret  W. Rossiter, ­Women Scientists in Amer­ic­ a: Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972, vol. 2 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 376, 379.

66. Hubbard and Randall, Shape of Red, pp. 121–122.



67. Hubbard and Randall, Shape of Red, p. 124.



68. Hubbard, “Sexism in Science,” Radcliffe Quarterly 62, no. 1 (1976): 8–11 (p. 11).

69. Hubbard, “Sexism,” p. 9. See Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Real­ity: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966). 70. Hubbard, “Review of Rosalind Franklin and DNA by Anne Sayre,” Signs 2, no.  1 (1976): 229–237 (p. 230). See also Hubbard, “When W ­ omen Fill Men’s Roles,” Trends in Bio­ chemical Sciences 1, no. 3 (1976): N52–­N53. 71. Ruth Hubbard et al., ­Women Look, p. xiii. A second edition, with some new essays, appeared in 1982 as Biological ­Woman: The Con­ve­nient Myth, ed. Hubbard, Henifin, and Fried (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman).

72. Hubbard, “Have Only Men Evolved?” in ­Women Look, p. 16.



73. Hubbard, “Have Only Men Evolved?” in ­Women Look, pp. 18–19, 16.



74. Hubbard, “Have Only Men Evolved?” in ­Women Look, p. 24.



75. Hubbard, “Have Only Men Evolved?” in ­Women Look, p. 25.



76. Hubbard, “Have Only Men Evolved?” in ­Women Look, pp. 28, 30.

77. Hubbard et al., ­Women Look, p. xviii. On feminist scientists’ use of Kuhn, see Mary Brown Parlee, “Psy­chol­ogy,” Signs 1, no.  1 (1975): 119–138 (esp. p.  125, fn 25); Evelyn Fox Keller “Kuhn, Feminism, and Science?” Configurations 6, no.  1 (1998): 15–19; and Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Helen Longino, “Lessons from Teaching the Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Historical Studies in the Natu­ral Sciences 42, no. 5 (2012): 542–544. Longino discusses Hubbard’s use of Kuhn in “Does the Structure of Scientific Revolutions Permit a Feminist Revolution in Science?” in Thomas Kuhn, ed. Thomas Nickles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 261–281 (esp. pp. 263–266).

78. Hubbard et al., ­Women Look, p. xvii.



79. Hubbard et al., ­Women Look, p. xix and xx.

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80. Barbara Fried, “Boys W ­ ill Be Boys W ­ ill Be Boys: The Language of Sex and Gender,” in ­Women Look, pp. 37–59. 81. Susan Leigh Star, “The Politics of Right and Left: Sex Differences in Hemispheric Brain Asymmetry,” in ­Women Look, pp. 61–74. 82. See Vicki Druss and Mary Sue Henifin, “Why Are so Many Anorexics W ­ omen?” (pp.  127–133); Emily  E. Culpepper, “Exploring Menstrual Attitudes” (pp.  135–161); and Marilyn Grossman and Pauline Bart, “Taking the Men out of Menopause” (pp. 163–185), in ­Women Look. 83. See Datha Clapper Brack, “Displaced—­the Midwife by the Male Physician” (pp.  83–101) and Mary Roth Walsh, “The Quirls of a ­Woman’s Brain” (pp.  103–125), in ­Women Look. 84. Weisstein, “Adventures of a W ­ oman in Science,” in ­Women Look, pp.  187–203 (p. 201).

85. Epilogue, ­Women Look at Biology, pp. 205–209 (p. 208).



86. Introduction to part 2, “Gaining Control,” in ­Women Look, p 80.



87. Hubbard, “Have Only Men Evolved?” in ­Women Look, p. 31.



88. Hubbard, “Have Only Men Evolved?” in ­Women Look, p. 32.

89. Ethel Tobach and Betty Rosoff, eds., Genes and Gender: I (New York: Gordian Press, 1978), pp. 7–8, 90. Division 35 of the APA and the Association for ­Women in Science also provided support (p. 7). On Ethel Tobach, see Rokisha Lewis, “Profile of Ethel Tobach” (2010, updated 2015) in Psy­chol­ogy’s Feminist Voices Multimedia Internet Archive, ed. Alexandra Rutherford, https://­feministvoices​.c­ om​/­profiles​/­ethel​-­tobach. 90. “G & G Collective History (AWP Meeting, 3 / 8 / 85),” Rec­ords of the Genes and Gender Collective, MC 526 [hereafter RGGC], box 3, folder 84 “Genes and Gender Panel, Association for ­Women in Psy­chol­ogy, March 8, 1985,” Schlesinger Library.

91. Conference program, box 1, folder 1, RGGC, Schlesinger Library.



92. Tobach and Rosoff, “Epilogue,” in Genes and Gender: I, p. 89.



93. Eleanor Leacock, “Society and Gender,” in Genes and Gender: I, p. 81.

94. Dorothy Burnham, “Biology and Gender,” in Genes and Gender: I, pp. 55, 58. See ­ orothy​-­burnham. Burnham’s oral history, https://­www​.t­ hehistorymakers​.­org​/ ­biography​/d

95. Tobach and Rosoff, “Epilogue,” in Genes and Gender: I, p. 90.

96. Ruth Hubbard and Marian Lowe, eds., Genes and Gender: II: Pitfalls in Research on Sex and Gender (New York: Gordian Press, 1979).

97. Hubbard and Lowe, “Introduction,” in Genes and Gender: II, pp. 24–26. 335

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98. Lila Leibowitz, “ ‘Universals’ and Male Dominance among Primates: A Critical Examination,” in Genes and Gender: II, p. 46. On Rowell and Lancaster, see Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989). 99. See Lila Leibowitz, Females, Males, Families: A Biosocial Approach (North Scituate, MA: Duxbury Press, 1978). 100. Ruth Bleier, “Social and Po­liti­cal Bias in Science: An Examination of Animal Studies and their Generalizations to H ­ uman Be­hav­ior and Evolution,” in Genes and Gender: II, pp. 54–55, 59 (emphasis original).

101. Bleier, “Social and Po­liti­cal,” pp. 61, 65–66.

102. Freda Salzman, “Aggression and Gender: A Critique of the Nature-­Nurture Question for ­Humans,” in Genes and Gender: II, pp. 71–90.

103. Salzman, “Aggression,” in Genes and Gender: II, pp. 81, 84, 85, 73.

104. Marian Lowe and Ruth Hubbard, “Sociobiology and Biosociology: Can Science Prove the Biological Basis of Sex Differences in Be­hav­ior?” in Genes and Gender: II, pp. 91–111. This essay was based on Marian Lowe, “Sociobiology and Sex Differences,” Signs 4, no. 1 (1978): 118–125. 105. Alice S. Rossi, “­Women in Science: Why So Few?” Science (ns) 148, no. 3674 (1965): 1196–1202 (p. 1201). See also Alice S. Rossi, “Equality between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal,” Daedalus 93, no. 2 (1964): 607–652. 106. Alice S. Rossi, “A Biosocial Perspective on Parenting,” Daedalus 106, no. 2 (1977): 1–31. 107. Rossi, “Biosocial Perspective,” p. 4. See also Rossi, “The Biosocial Side of Parenthood,” ­Human Nature 1, no. 6 (1973): 72–79. 108. Janice Raymond’s essay on male-­to-­female transsexuals expresses a similar anti-­ essentialism, as does Susan Leigh Star’s on brain lateralization.

109. Lowe and Hubbard, “Conclusions,” in Genes and Gender: II, pp. 143–151.

110. Lowe and Hubbard, “Sociobiology and Biosociology” in Genes and Gender: II, p.  96. They drew the distinction from Richard Lewontin, “The Analy­sis of Variance and the Analy­sis of ­Causes,” American Journal of ­Human Ge­ne­tics 26, no.  3 (1974): 400–411. 111. Ethel Tobach, “The Methodology of Sociobiology from the Viewpoint of a Comparative Psychologist,” in The Sociobiology Debate: Readings on Ethical and Scientific Issues, ed. Arthur L. Caplan, with a foreword by Edward O. Wilson (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), pp. 411–423.

336

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112. Mary Midgely, “Rival Fatalisms: The Hollowness of the Sociobiology Debate” (pp. 15–38) and “Gene-­juggling” (pp. 108–133) in Sociobiology Examined, ed. Ashley Montagu (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Other essays briefly mention sociobiology’s pejorative view of ­women within a broader critique of its reductionism, notably Steven Rose, “ ‘It’s Only H ­ uman Nature’: The Sociobiologist’s Fairyland,” pp.  158–170 (p. 169). Midgely actually defended some aspects of sociobiology in her 1978 Beast and Man (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; rev. ed. Routledge, 1995). 113. For a critique of essentialism in both masculinist and feminist primatology, see Susan Sperling, “Baboons with Briefcases: Feminism, Functionalism, and Sociobiology in the Evolution of Primate Gender,” Signs 17, no. 1 (1991): 1–27. On the history of feminist primatology, see Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the Making of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Milam, Creatures of Cain, esp. chapter 7 and pp. 269–274. 114. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The ­Woman That Never Evolved (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981; with new preface and bibliographical updates, 1999), p. 14.

115. Hrdy, ­Woman, pp. 14, 97.

116. Naomi Weisstein, “Tired of Arguing about Biological Inferiority?” Ms., November 1982, pp. 41–46, 85 (p. 42fn). Lila Leibowitz also distinguished her own feminist stance from that of the feminist sociobiologists in her review of Signs 4, no. 1 (1978) in the Association for W ­ omen in Science Newsletter 8, no. 1 (1979): 5–8 (p. 7); see Lila Leibowitz Papers 84-­M202-85-­M186, box 1, folder 13, Schlesinger Library.

117. Weisstein, “Tired of Arguing,” pp. 85, 45 (emphasis original).

118. Hrdy, ­Woman, pp. 21–25. Acknowledging that the theory of anisogamy was often used “too deterministically,” Hrdy considered primate exceptions to the general rule, in which males ­were deeply involved with the rearing of offspring (p. 205, fn 6). 119. Hubbard, “­Human Nature,” in The Politics of ­Women’s Biology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 107–118 (p. 111).

120. Hubbard, “­Human Nature,” in Politics, p. 111.



121. Hrdy, ­Woman, pp. 205–206, fn 6.

122. Wilson papers, box 162, folder 6, correspondence with Lionel Tiger, Library of Congress; see esp. Wilson’s letters from March 20 and July 28, 1980, and Tiger’s letter from November 5, 1980. 123. Tiger, “Male Dominance? Yes, Alas. A Sexist Plot? No,” New York Times Maga­ zine, October  25, 1970; David Barash, Sociobiology and Be­hav­ior (New York: Elsevier), p. 283. 124. Epilogue, ­Women Look, p. 206. 337

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 5 8 – 2 6 5

125. “G & G Collective History (AWP Meeting, 3 / 8 / 85),” box 3, folder 84 “Genes and Gender Panel, Association for ­Women in Psy­chol­ogy, March 8, 1985,” RGGC, Schlesinger Library. 126. Tobach, “Genes and Gender Update,” in Genes and Gender IV: The Second X and ­Women’s Health, ed. Myra Fooden, assoc. eds. Susan Gordon and Betty Hughley (New York: Gordian Press, 1983), pp. 7–28. 127. RGGC, Schlesinger Library, box 2, folder 24 “Monograph Vio­ lence against ­Women, Symposium on Sociobiology and vio­lence against ­women, held at Eastern Psychological Association in 1984, 1981–1984 and n.d.” The papers at this symposium ­were collected in The Genes and Gender Monograph Series Vol I: Vio­lence against ­Women: A Critique of the Sociobiology of Rape, ed. Suzanne R. Sunday and Ethel Tobach (New York: Gordian Press, 1985).

Conclusion 1. Neil Jumonville characterizes this shift as a split in liberalism itself: between the classical liberals like E. O. Wilson, who defended universal values, and the New Left, like sociobiology’s critics, who favored multiculturalism and identity politics; see Jumonville, “The Cultural Politics of the Sociobiology Debate,” Journal of the History of Biology 35 (2002): 569–596. 2. Susan McKinnon, Neo-­Liberal Ge­ne­tics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolu­ tionary Psy­chol­ogy (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2005). On the neoliberal appeal to “innate intelligence” and “natu­ral order,” see Andrew S. Winston, “Neoliberalism and IQ: Naturalizing Economic and Racial In­equality,” Theory and Psy­chol­ogy 28, no.  5 (2018): 600–618. 3. Ashley Montagu, Touching: The ­Human Significance of the Skin (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). 4. Ashley Montagu, ed., Sociobiology Examined (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 5. Richard Lewontin, Leon J. Kamin, and Steve Rose, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ide­ ology, and H ­ uman Nature (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 6. Ruth Hubbard, The Politics of ­Women’s Biology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). On Hubbard’s objections to reproductive technologies, see Jenna Tonn, “Fight Over the Technological ­Future of Motherhood,” Immanent Frame, August  28, 2020, https://­tif​.­ssrc​.­org​/­2020​/­08​/­28​/­fight​-­over​-­the​-­technological​-f­ uture​-­of​-­motherhood​/­. 7. The Seville Statement on Vio­lence was drawn up by a group of twenty scientists at the Sixth International Colloquium on Brain and Aggression held at the University of Seville, Spain, May 14–16, 1986. The statement was modeled on the UNESCO Statement on 338

N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 6 6 – 2 6 7

Race and was itself ­later endorsed by UNESCO. Among its authors ­were Samuel A. Barnett, Robert Hinde, and John Paul Scott. See “Seville Statement on Vio­lence,” American Psy­ chologist 45 (1990): 1167–1168. 8. Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of ­Human Vio­lence (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox (New York: Pantheon, 2019). 9. Frans De Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005); De Waal, Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves (New York: Norton, 2019). De Waal began writing popu­lar primatology in the 1980s, beginning with Chimpanzee Politics (1982) and Peace­ making among Primates (1989). 10. Marta Mirazon Lahr et al., “Inter-­group Vio­lence among Early Holocene Hunter-­ Gatherers of West Turkana, ­Kenya,” Nature 529, no. 7586 (2016): 394–398. 11. James Gorman, “Prehistoric Mass Killing in Africa Offers Clues on the Origin of War,” New York Times, Jan 21, 2016, p. A7.

12. “Is Warfare in Our Bones?” New York Times, January 24, 2016.

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It is a plea­sure to thank the many p ­ eople who helped me think through the ideas and issues discussed in this book and who gave me the confidence to believe I had something to say about them. I alone, however, am responsible for the story told in ­these pages. Many thanks to the following archivists and librarians for their generous help: Lizette Royer Barton and Cathy Faye at the Archives of the History of American Psy­chol­ogy, Cummings Center for the History of Psy­chol­ogy, University of Akron, Akron, Ohio; Roy Goodman, Valerie-­Anne Lutz, and Charles Greifenstein at the American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia; Meg McAleer at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Jane Parr at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at the Boston University Department of Special Collections, Boston; Emma Sarconi at the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Prince­ton University, Prince­ton; Ellen Shea at the Schlesinger Library for the History of ­Women in Amer­ic­ a at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts; and Patrick Hayes at the University of Saskatchewan University Archives and Special Collections, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. For permission to cite materials or reproduce images, I thank the copyright ­owners, libraries, and archives cited in the endnotes. ­Every effort has been made to identify copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyrighted material. Notification of any additions or corrections that should be incorporated in ­future reprints or editions of this book would be greatly appreciated. Grateful thanks to Catherine Peters, who generously shared her recollections and insights with me, both in person at her home in Oxford, ­England, and over email, and who granted me permission to quote from the papers of Anthony Storr in her private collection. Thanks to Dr. Robert Barton for facilitating our exchange. I am grateful to Edward O. Wilson, Kathleen Horton, and the members of the Wilson laboratory, who welcomed me to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard one winter after­noon in 2016. My thanks to Dr. Wilson for granting me an interview, for generously sharing materials and memories with me, and for his kind support and encouragement. 341

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Portions of chapter 3 ­were first published in “Popularizing the Ancestry of Man: Robert Ardrey and the Killer Instinct,” Isis 102 (2011), pp.  269–299. Chapter 4 builds on ideas presented in “An Anthropologist on TV: Ashley Montagu and the Biological Basis of ­Human Nature, 1945–1960,” included in Cold War Social Science, edited by Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens and published in 2012 by Palgrave Macmillan. Thanks to the editors and publishers for permission to rework some of this material in the context of this book. I presented portions of my work at meetings of Cheiron, the History of Science Society, the American Historical Association, the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, the Conference on the History of Recent Social Science, and the First Brazilian Congress for the History of Psy­chol­ogy, and I thank the participants in ­those meetings for helpful feedback. I also thank Jordan Theriault, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and the members of the Barrett laboratory at Northeastern University for their generous and constructive responses to my work. At Harvard University Press, I am grateful to Janice Audet, Stephanie Vyce, and Emeralde Jensen-­Roberts for their skill, professionalism, and kindness. My thanks to Marga Vicedo, to an anonymous reviewer for the press, and to the Board of Syndics whose comments helped improve the manuscript. Susan Campbell, Greg Hyman, and Brian Ostrander provided expert copyediting and guidance through the publication pro­cess. Many thanks to my colleagues and friends for helpful and inspiring conversations over the years: Leena Akhtar, Jennifer Bazar, Janet Browne, Richard Burkhardt, John Carson, David Clark, Dave Devonis, Dorothy Fragaszy, Anne Harrington, Ben Harris, Allison Hart, Daniel Horo­witz, Andy Jewett, Syd Lefkoe, Rebecca Lemov, Richard Lewontin, Ian Lubek, Everett Mendelsohn, Erika Milam, Stéphanie Pache, Diane Paul, Michael Pettit, Petteri Pietikäinen, Steven Pinker, Robert Poole, Gregory Radick, Anne C. Rose, Alexandra Rutherford, Annukka Sailo, Sigrid Schmalzer, Myrna Perez Sheldon, Betty Smocovitis, Mike Sokal, Mark Solovey, Barbara Stern, Larry Stern, Jerry ­Sullivan, Jenna Tonn, William Tucker, Andrew Winston, Kevin Yelvington, and Jacy Young. I benefited from knowledgeable and efficient research assistance from Eroica René, Tim Leonard, and Alex Schweig. I have learned much from conversations about the themes of this book with my students at the Harvard University Extension School, the Department of History of Science at Harvard, and the Department of Psy­chol­ogy at Boston College. The Department of the History of Science at Harvard provides a most stimulating environment in which to pursue my work, and I am grateful to my colleagues ­there for their support. I also thank the department for funding for this book proj­ect. I thank the members of the In­de­pen­dent ­Women Scholars’ Salon (IWSS), who offered me unstinting intellectual and moral support and much helpful critique of early chapter drafts: Lara Friedenfelds, Martha Gardner, Joy Harvey, Susan Lanzoni, Debra Levine, Rachael Rosner, Kara Swanson, Conevery Bolton 342

A ckn o w l­e d g ments

Valencius, Kate Viens, Debbie Weinstein, and Ilyon Woo. My thanks to Sara Tjossem and Victor Seow, who read my work with thought and care and helped me find my voice; and to Marga Vicedo and Larry Nichols, who generously shared their own historical writings and archival materials with me and offered constructive responses to my work. I am grateful to Susan Lanzoni for invaluable feedback on my final chapter drafts. I am im­mensely indebted to my ­family for all their love and support. My heartfelt thanks to my ­mother, Bette S. Weidman, who accompanied me on archive ventures, discussed ideas with me, read e­ very word I wrote and offered insightful comments, and gave me the benefit of her enormously wide reading and scholarship. Many thanks to my ­sister, Amanda Weidman, for sharing with me her knowledge of the history of anthropology, and for her helpful responses to my chapters and her expertise in scholarly book-­writing. I am grateful to my ­father, Burt Weidman, and to my brother-­in-­law Ken Whang, for many enlightening conversations about politics, history, and psy­chol­ogy. To Sylvia and Valerie Whang, many thanks for all the encouragement and fun. Leora and Andrew Ferrari grew up with this book as a presence in their lives; their support was always unwavering, and I benefited greatly from their comments, and their taste and judgment. Their love has truly shown me the best of h ­ uman nature. Joe Ferrari was always on the lookout for relevant news articles and scoured used bookstores for hidden gems. He read my drafts with an unerring editorial eye, listened patiently to all my ideas, and gave me thoughtful feedback on ­every aspect of my work. Joe, my love, no words are adequate to express my gratitude to you. Your constant interest, encouragement, support, and love made pos­si­ble in e­ very way my engagement with my work. I can only hope that this book goes a ­little way t­ oward justifying the faith you placed in me.

343

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1.1

Konrad Lorenz, “Comparative Method in Studying Innate Behaviour Patterns,” Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology, No. IV: Physiological Mechanisms in Animal Be­hav­ior (New York: Academic Press, 1950), 221–268, p. 256. Reproduced with permission of The Com­pany of Biologists, Ltd.

1.2

Reproduced from Robert Högfeldt, Das Högfeldtbuch (Berlin: Verlag Paul Neff, 1937).

1.3

Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.

1.4

Photo by Nina Leen / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images.

1.5

Photo by Nina Leen / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images.

2.1

(a–­d) Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Com­pany, 1952). Copyright © 1952 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Taylor & Francis Group.

3.1

Reproduced from Raymond A. Dart with Dennis Craig, Adventures with the Missing Link (New York: Harper & ­Brothers, 1959), p. 149.

3.2

Mary Evans Picture Library.

3.3

Reproduced with the permission of California Institute of Technology.

3.4

(a) Reproduced from Robert Ardrey, African Genesis (New York: Atheneum, 1961), p. 177.



(b) Reproduced from Robert Ardrey, African Genesis (New York: Atheneum, 1961), p. 337.



(c) Reproduced from Robert Ardrey, Territorial Imperative (New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. 257. 345

I ll u strati o n C re d its

346



(d) Reproduced from Robert Ardrey, Territorial Imperative (New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. 236.

4.1

HUP Sorokin, Pitirim A. (3a) olvwork223507. Harvard University Archives.

4.3

Photo­graph by Editta Sherman from the flyleaf of Ashley Montagu, The Natu­ral Superiority of ­Women (New York: Macmillan, 1953).

5.1

Reproduced from Sally Binford, “Apes and Original Sin,” ­Human Be­hav­ior (Nov / Dec 1972), pp. 64–71.

6.1

Reproduced with permission from Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by Edward O. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), copyright © 1975 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

6.3

Reproduced with permission from Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by Edward O. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), copyright © 1975 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

7.1

Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

7.2

Courtesy of Psy­chol­ogy’s Feminist Voices.

7.3

(a–­b) Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

Abel, 91, 104 adaptationism, 191, 197, 207 Adler, Alfred, 64, 69, 71, 119 Adler, Mortimer, 97 Adventures with the Missing Link (Dart), 84 African Genesis (Ardrey), 4, 77, 83, 84–89, 91, 93–96, 104, 148; illustrations in, 92; publication of, 96–97, 137; reviews of, 97–98 aggression, 3–4, 7–8, 13, 49, 145, 197–198, 207, 233; debate about, 11–13, 42, 67–69, 70–71, 141–144, 149–157, 160–174, 180–185, 188, 189–197, 217, 222, 226–227, 258, 262–265; definitions of, 3, 8, 50, 65–66, 67, 71–74, 104, 145, 153, 166, 192–194, 197; instinct for, 5, 8, 10–12, 49–50, 53–54, 56–62, 65–77, 83–89, 94, 98–105, 120–121, 136, 141, 145–148, 153, 157–169, 172, 180, 183–185, 194–197, 218–219, 247, 261; as male trait, 72–73, 99, 103, 166, 196, 219, 247–249, 251–252, 262 aggressionists: criticism of, 143–144, 146, 149, 153–154, 156, 159–160, 167, 173, 182–184, 201–202, 204, 218, 226, 230, 260–264; defined, 10–12; members of group of, 70, 72, 169; view of ­human nature of, 141, 144, 151, 160, 172, 189, 211, 213, 218, 260–264. See also pop ethology: prac­ti­tion­ers of Akhilananda, Swami, 138–139

Albertus University (Königsberg), 34, 175 Aliens Act, 109 Allee, W. C. (Warder Clyde), 11, 113–115, 116, 119, 127 Allen, Garland, 233–235 Allport, Gordon, 126, 138 Altenberg, Austria, 18, 20, 36 altruism, 10, 11, 13, 99, 107–108, 113–115, 119–123, 125–131, 137–141; in sociobiology, 198–200, 207–208, 211, 214, 218, 226. See also amitology Altruistic Love (Sorokin), 128 amateurs: as prac­ti­tion­ers of science, 9, 19, 31–32, 44–47, 77, 89–91, 93–94, 98, 163, 221, 261, 263 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 113, 223–225, 232 American Association of Physical Anthropologists, 109 American Association of University Professors, 237 American Museum of Natu­ral History, 245 amitology, 126–130, 261 amity-­enmity complex, 87, 99–100 Andreski, Stanislav, 68 androcentrism, 231, 241, 244–245. See also sexism 347

INDEX

animal-­human analogy, 29, 58, 60–61, 70–73, 100, 110–111, 116, 140, 146, 159, 266; criticism of, 40, 151–153; in sociobiology, 171–172, 175, 181–182, 189, 205, 212, 219, 228 animal keeping, as research method, 21–23 anisogamy, 241, 256–257, 259 anthropomorphism, 29, 31, 182, 233 anti-­Semitism, 109 apartheid, 82, 156, 182–183 appetitive be­hav­ior, 28 Arditti, Rita, 230–235, 240, 246 Ardrey, Berdine (Grunewald), 84–85, 91, 92 Ardrey, Robert, 3, 4–6, 7, 11, 14, 15, 67, 70, 133, 141–142, 162, 170, 178–179, 183, 189, 211, 220–221, 266–267; on aggression, 77, 87–88, 100–101, 160, 183–184, 194–197, 260; criticism of, 143, 149–156, 169, 170, 182, 189, 195–197, 211, 227, 230, 262; as dramatist, 78–79, 81, 89, 90–91, 93, 154; early life of, 78; education of, 78; and E. O. Wilson, 185, 194–197, 215–218, 220, 227, 228; and ethology, 87–88, 90, 98–101, 105, 179; on group se­lection, 195–196; marriage to Berdine Grunewald, 84, 156; and paleoanthropology, 75–77, 82, 84–87, 90, 91, 260; as science pop­u­lar­izer, 75–77, 84–85, 87–94, 96–101, 104–105, 136–137, 142, 148, 150–151, 158, 160, 183–184, 189, 197, 204, 216–218, 260–261; as screenwriter, 78–80, 89. See also African Genesis; Hunting Hypothesis; Social Contract; Territorial Imperative Arendt, Hannah, 145 Ascoli, Max, 82 Atheneum Publishers, 91, 96, 203 Atlantic, The, 146 atomic bomb, 72, 88, 119 attachment theory, 50, 131 Australopithecines, 4, 82–83, 86, 91, 95, 193. See also Australopithecus africanus Australopithecus africanus, 75, 82–83, 85, 88, 93, 95, 149, 260, 262 348

Australopithecus robustus, 85 Austrian Acad­emy of Sciences, 36 Barash, David, 224, 232 Barnet, Richard J., 159–160 Barnett, Samuel A., 149, 153, 173, 175 Bates, Marston, 97 Beatty, John, 149 Beckwith, Jonathan, 224 behaviorism, 8, 150, 187; as epithet applied to critics of ethology, 14, 22, 42, 143, 146, 160–166, 174, 176–178, 182, 214 ­Behind the Mirror (Lorenz), 184 Bender, Loretta, 119 Benedict, Ruth, 109 Bennet, Edward Armstrong, 63 Berger, Peter L., 239 Berkowitz, Leonard, 171–172 Berlin Zoo, 20 Bessie, Simon Michael, 96–97, 203, 293n73 biodenial, 15 biogram, 166, 213–215, 218–219, 327n93 biological determinism, 107–108, 120, 131, 134, 141, 180–181; criticism of, 12–14, 215, 225, 227–234, 240–241, 247, 258–259 biophobia, 15 blacklist, 80, 81. See also Hollywood blank slate, 1, 15, 42, 100, 108, 120, 143, 177, 180–181, 194, 196. See also behaviorism; environmentalism Blank Slate, The (Pinker), 275n46 Bleier, Ruth, 251–252 Boas, Franz, 109, 143 Bolshevism, 62, 122–123 bonding: between animals, 4, 8, 33, 49, 58–62, 68–73, 76, 99, 147, 284n16; between ­mother and infant, 51–53, 119, 131, 140; male, 87, 94, 102, 166, 168, 196, 256, 262 Boston Globe, 226 Boston University, 138 Boulding, Kenneth, 149, 153, 154, 155 Bowditch, E. Francis, 139

INDEX

Bowlby, John, 50–53, 64, 131 breastfeeding, 140 Brightman, Edgar Sheffield, 138 British Museum of Natu­ral History, 67 Bronx Zoo, 42–43 Broom, Robert, 82, 85, 90, 94 Brotherhood of Fear (Ardrey), 81 Brown University, 138 Buck, Paul, 126 Bühler, Charlotte, 119 Bühler, Karl, 20–21 Buldern, 36 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 147 Burnham, Dorothy C., 249–250 Burrow, Trigant, 119 Burton, John, 68 Bushmen, 100, 103 Cain, 88, 91, 104 Calhoun, John B., 320n128 Camus, Albert, 211 capitalism, 77, 101, 120, 155, 168, 177, 182, 234, 265 Caplan, Arthur, 255 Carpenter, Frank M., 187 Carrighar, Sally, 98, 149, 154 Carthy, J. D. (John Dennis), 67 Casey Jones (Ardrey), 78 Chasin, Barbara, 231 Chatwin, Bruce, 179–180 Chomsky, Noam, 327n93 Christ’s College (Cambridge), 63 Cichlids, 48–50, 57, 59, 61–62, 145 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 121 Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins (Lorenz), 176–179 Clarke, Arthur C., 104 Clockwork Orange, A, 180 Cloud, Wallace, 175–176 Cold War, 9, 12, 48–49, 61, 77, 100, 104, 125, 141, 165, 220, 261 Columbia University, 20, 109, 130

communism, 9, 12, 79–81, 113, 168; as epithet applied to critics of pop ethology, 14, 101, 144, 165, 174, 263; as opposed to ­human nature, 132–133, 142, 261, 263; Sorokin’s encounter with, 123–124 “Companions as ­Factors in the Bird’s Environment” (Lorenz), 33 competition: definitions of, 64, 189, 190–191, 194–196, 198; as motor of evolutionary pro­cess, 7, 10, 58, 110–112, 114, 115, 119–120, 208, 233, 259 “Competitive and Aggressive Be­hav­ior” (Wilson), 189–193, 194 conditioning, 9–10, 39, 100–101, 142, 146, 165, 177, 179, 253, 261. See also behaviorism; environmentalism; reflex Conklin, Edwin Grant, 110, 112, 113, 114 cooperation, 10–12, 14–15, 64, 102, 106–108, 110–120, 137, 140–144, 151–152, 181–182, 184, 226, 260–261, 266; in insect socie­ties, 200, 208; as natu­ral attribute of ­women, 130–131. See also drive: ­toward cooperation Cousins, Norman, 131 Craig, Wallace, 21, 24, 28, 32 creative altruism. See Research Society for Creative Altruism creativity, 108, 137–138, 141 Crisis of Our Age (Sorokin), 128 critical period, 25 Crook, John Hurrell, 149, 150–151, 153–154 Cuban Missile Crisis, 88, 145 cultural relativism, 108–110, 112, 113, 115, 171 Dart, Raymond, 75–77, 82–95, 102, 104, 149, 183, 189, 260; criticism of, 93, 94–95, 182, 189–190; pictured wielding bone weapon, 85; as pop­u­lar­izer, 84, 86 Darwin, Charles, 7, 111, 120, 160, 214 Darwin: Competition and Cooperation (Montagu), 120 349

INDEX

Darwinism, 8, 58, 60, 69, 111, 120, 205–206, 214, 240. See also evolutionary synthesis; social Darwinism) Das Sogennante Böse (Lorenz). See On Aggression Dawkins, Richard, 326n69 death drive. See drive: ­toward aggression and death De Beauvoir, Simone, 133 Degler, Carl, N., 276n46 democracy, 77, 79, 81, 95–96, 101, 113, 134 Department of Social Relations (Harvard), 126 Department of Sociology (Harvard), 124, 126 deprivation experiment. See ethology: experiment in Derby, Harry, 137 Descent of Man, The (Darwin), 111 Descent of ­Woman, The (Morgan), 167 determinism. See biological determinism DeVore, Irven, 231, 248 De Waal, Frans, 15, 266 displacement, 28 Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 117, 312n21 Dollard, John, 8 domestication: of animals, 21, 32–37, 40–41, 56, 61; of ­people, 34, 35, 37, 40–41, 56–57, 61, 162, 176, 256 domestic science. See ethology dominance hierarchy. See pecking order Drinker, Sophie, 134 drive: ­toward aggression and death, 7, 8, 50, 56, 58, 60, 62, 65, 67–72, 87–88, 99, 187, 194, 196, 273 (see also aggression: instinct for); ­toward cooperation, 10–11, 12, 106–108, 114, 115–116, 119, 121, 127, 130–131, 140–144, 151, 181–182, 260–262; as distinct from instinct, 20, 42, 119, 143–144, 181, 185, 189; inhibitory, 57, 67 (see also inhibition; ritualization) dualism, 38 Dubos, René, 172 Dunn, L. C., 117 350

Ebling, F. J., 67 Education Amendments Act, 237 Eichmann, Adolf, 144 Einstein, Albert, 120–121 Eisenberg, John F., 189 Eisenberg, Leon, 173–174, 175 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 80 emotion, 1, 7, 23, 31, 64, 66, 102, 106, 113, 116, 128, 140–141, 177, 184; in animals, 9, 23, 29, 47, 52; as counterpart to instinct, 11, 28–29, 35–37, 60, 102, 104, 141, 177; as guide to morality, 36–37, 57, 61, 116, 128, 141, 177 empathy, 29, 91, 128 Encounter, 149 ­Enemy Within, The (Star Trek episode), 104 environment: as influence on be­hav­ior, 10, 38–39, 109, 113, 116, 129, 146, 171, 180–181, 247, 252–254; role of in instinct theory, 3, 8, 21–24, 30, 38–39, 41, 187; role of in sociobiology, 190–192, 196, 207–209, 213–214, 218, 256. See also innate / learned dichotomy environmentalism: as epithet applied to critics of ethology, 12–15, 41–42, 88, 93, 100, 143–144, 146, 163–166, 171, 184, 262; as epithet applied to critics of sociobiology, 13–15, 194, 226, 229–230, 259. See also behaviorism Equal Rights Amendment, 133 Erikson, Erik, 69 Essay on Morals, An (Wylie), 161 essentialism, 11–14, 112, 115, 131, 133–134, 141–144, 151, 169, 213; criticism of, 14, 151, 169, 225, 244–245, 253–257, 259, 265. See also biological determinism “Ethicogenesis” (Leake), 113 ethics, 110–118, 205, 215, 219. See also nature, as guide to morality ethology, 3, 19, 66, 146, 226; amateurs in, 31–32, 44–47, 74; criticism of, 37–42, 66–67, 69, 71, 96, 187–191, 208–209, 210, 241, 250;

INDEX

as domestic science, 18–19, 21–22, 261; experiment in, 19, 21–23, 39, 41, 147; founding of, 18; instinct theory of, 23–30, 26, 32–34, 36–37, 69, 76–77, 87, 99–100; method of, 21–23, 30–32, 42–47; observation in, 30–32; storytelling in, 30–31. See also pop ethology eugenics, 40, 178–180, 219, 227 Evolution and Modification of Be­hav­ior (Lorenz), 41 evolutionary psy­chol­ogy, 1–2, 3, 6, 15, 265–266 evolutionary synthesis, 205–206, 211 Explorations in Altruistic Love and Be­hav­ior (Sorokin), 138 Eysenck, Hans, 63 Fairbairn, W. R. D. (William Ronald Dodds), 64 fascism, 62, 100, 113, 144, 174, 261 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 72 feminism, 72, 133–134, 167–169, 225–226, 231–235, 239, 246; and critique of science, 14–15, 250–259 Flint, Richard Foster, 82 Four Horse­men of the Apocalypse, The (Ardrey), 89 Fox, Robin, 137, 166, 169, 211, 217, 228, 229 Francis, Arlene, 135 Freeman, Derek, 287n66 Freud, Sigmund, 7–8, 51, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 73, 121, 128 Fried, Barbara, 243 Friedan, Betty, 72 Fromm, Erich, 273n26 frustration / aggression hypothesis, 8, 50, 65, 71, 183 Fulbright, William J., 158–159 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 127, 138 Gebhardt, Margarethe. See Lorenz, Margarethe

gender, 72, 131, 142, 166–167, 184, 225, 259, 262, 264; and science, 237–238, 248–250. See also feminism; sexism Generation of Vipers (Wylie), 161 Genes and Gender (Tobach and Rosoff ), 246–255 Genes and Gender Collective, 224–225, 254–255, 258–259, 264; first meeting of, 245–250, 248–249, 254; second meeting of, 224, 225, 250–255 ge­ne­tic determinism. See biological determinism ge­ne­tics: Mendelian, 205; population, 197, 205, 206, 209. See also population biology Genovese, Kitty, 145 Gerard, Ralph W., 127 Goldberg, Steven, 249 Golding, William, 166 Goodall, Jane, 140 Goody, Jack, 97 Gorer, Geoffrey, 149, 153, 155 Gould, Stephen Jay, 215, 224, 230, 232, 237, 255 ­Great War. See World War I Greif, Mark, 311n4 greylag geese, 4, 18, 21, 24, 29, 59, 69, 87, 187, 262; triumph ceremony of, 59–60 group se­lection, 195–196, 198–200, 207–208, 323n26 Group Theater, 78 Hadza, 103 Hahnemann Medical College, 109, 118 Haldane, J. B. S. (John Burdon Sanderson), 40, 216 Hall, Edward T., 158 Hall, Elizabeth, 178 Hamburg, David, 102 Hamilton, William, 195, 198, 199 Hamline University, 124 haplodiploidy, 199 Harper’s, 146 351

INDEX

Harvard Research Center in Altruistic Integration and Creativity, 11, 108, 122, 126, 129, 137, 141. See also Sorokin Harvard University, 108, 118, 124, 126, 127, 130, 138, 185–188, 225, 227, 228, 235–239 Harvard University Press, 201–203, 231 Hebb, Donald, 38–39, 42 Heinroth, Magdalena, 20 Heinroth, Oskar, 20, 24, 32 Helmuth, Hermann, 171 hereditarianism, 144, 227, 245, 250. See also biological determinism heredity and environment. See innate /  learned dichotomy Herrick, C. Judson, 112, 113, 114 Herrnstein, Richard, 234 Hill, Denis, 68 Hinde, Robert, 313n33 Hinduism. See Ramakrishna Order of Hinduism Hindu Psy­chol­ogy: Its Meaning for the West (Akhilananda), 138 Hitler, Adolf, 112, 121, 125, 178–179 Hobbes, Thomas, 7, 114, 267 Hochstetter, Ferdinand, 20–21 Holloway, Ralph, 149–155 Hollywood, 79–81, 82, 95, 101 Holmes, Samuel, 127 Hopkins, Milo, 137 House and Garden, 203 House Un-­American Activities Committee, 79 Howard, Eliot, 87 Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer, 255–257 Hubbard, Frank, 236 Hubbard, Ruth (Hoffman), 14, 215, 225, 233–235, 238, 246; ­career of, 236–241; as critic of science, 238–245; as critic of sexism, 233–235, 238–245, 250–259, 264; as critic of sociobiology, 238–245, 256–259; early life of, 236; education of, 236; and Genes and Gender Collective, 225, 245, 250–254, 264; marriage to Frank 352

Hubbard, 236; marriage to George Wald, 236–237; and Sociobiology Study Group, 235 ­Human Aggression (Storr), 70–73, 157 human-­animal analogy. See animal-­human analogy humanistic psy­chol­ogy, 11, 138, 260 humanities. See science-­humanities relationship ­human nature. See aggression; cooperation; drive; instinct ­Human Revolution, The (Montagu), 139, 149 Hunt, Morton, 172 hunter-­gatherers, 102, 205, 218 hunting, 102–103, 166–167, 183–184, 196 Hunting Hypothesis, The (Ardrey), 183–184, 216–218 Husted, Marjorie Child, 133–134 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 96, 97 Huxley, Julian, 21, 112 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 7, 111, 112 hymenopteran insects, 198–199 Imperial Animal, The (Tiger and Fox), 166–167 imprinting, 3, 20, 25–26, 43, 52, 162 inclusive fitness, 195, 198–200, 208, 214 Inevitability of Patriarchy, The (Goldberg), 249 inhibition, 54, 56–57, 59, 60–61, 67, 71–72 inhibitory mechanisms. See inhibition “Innate Forms of Pos­si­ble Experience” (Lorenz), 34–35, 179 innate / learned dichotomy, 25, 151–152; criticism of, 37–39, 164–165, 181; Lorenz’s defense of, 41, 165. See also nature / nurture dichotomy innate releasing mechanism (IRM), 23–24, 25, 27 Insect Socie­ties, The (Wilson), 188, 198–202, 206–207, 213; publication of, 201–202 instinct: criticism of, 13, 37–42, 151–152, 164–166, 171–172, 181–182, 185, 188–195, 209, 210, 230, 247, 260–261; as distinct from

INDEX

drive, 20, 42, 119, 143–144, 181, 185, 189; domestication and, 33–37; and emotion, 11, 28–29, 35–37, 60, 102, 104, 141, 177; ethological theory of, 22–30, 26, 32–34, 36–37, 48, 52–62, 69, 76–77, 87, 99–100, 160–162, 187–188; in h ­ umans, 60–62, 77, 141, 153, 160–162, 172, 178, 183, 260; hydraulic model of, 26–­28, 38; lock and key model of, 23–24, 54, 61, 191; maternal, 247. See also aggression: instinct for; ethology Institute for Comparative Be­hav­ior Study (Altenberg), 36 Integrity of the Personality, The (Storr), 63–65 interdemic se­lection. See group se­lection International Committee Against Racism (INCAR), 224, 228, 229 intuition, 31–32, 91, 93, 98, 211, 231, 263 jackdaws, 18, 20, 24, 31, 187 James, William, 7, 172 Jeb (Ardrey), 79 Jensen, Arthur, 227, 229, 231, 234 Johannesburg (South Africa), 75, 83, 182 Johnson, Lyndon B., 157 Jones, Arthur, 97 Jones, Lewis Webster, 137 Jordan, David Starr, 110 Journal of Conflict Resolution, 146 Jung, Carl, 63, 64, 161 just so story, 214, 228 Kamin, Leon, 265 Kazan, Elia, 78–80 Keith, Arthur, 109, 110 Kennedy, John F., 103, 145 Kennedy, J. S. (John Stodart), 38–39 Kennedy, Robert F., 157 Kerensky, Alexander, 123 Khartoum (Ardrey), 89 Khrushchev, Nikita, 145 King, Martin Luther, 145, 157

King Solomon’s Ring (Lorenz), 17–18, 19, 31, 36, 37, 49, 59, 60, 74, 186; argument for aggression in, 54, 56–57; Lorenz’s illustrations in, 55 kin se­lection. See inclusive fitness Kitchelt, Florence, 133 Klein, Melanie, 51, 66, 70–71 Klopfer, Peter, 172 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 126 Königsberg. See Albertus University of Königsberg Kropotkin, Peter, 10, 110–111, 112, 116, 119, 120, 127 Kubrick, Stanley, 5, 104, 180 Kuhn, Thomas, 242 Lake Turkana, 266–267 Lancaster, C. S., 102–103 Lancaster, Jane, 251 Landry, Sarah, 202 Lashley, Karl, 39 Leach, Edmund, 149, 153, 154, 189 Leacock, Eleanor, 224, 232, 247–249, 251, 254 Leake, Chauncey, 112, 113, 116 Leakey, Louis, 82, 85, 89–­90, 93, 94, 184 Leakey, Mary, 82, 85, 184 learning. See innate-­learned dichotomy Leaves from a Rus­sian Diary (Sorokin), 122–123 Lecher, Emma, 20 Lee, Richard B., 248 Leerlaufreaktionen. See vacuum activities Lehrman, Daniel, 39–40, 42, 153, 164–165, 181 Leibowitz, Lila, 168, 230–1, 240, 251 Lenin, Vladimir, 123 Lewis, Aubrey, 63 Lewontin, Richard C., 215, 224, 232, 237, 265 liberalism, 12, 77, 81, 101, 134, 142, 152, 178, 264–265 Life, 89, 157 Lilly, Eli, 126, 129, 137 353

INDEX

Lipp­mann, Walter, 97 Livingstone (Northern Rhodesia), 84 London School of Economics, 109 Lord of the Flies (Golding), 166 Lorenz, Adolf, 20 Lorenz, Konrad Z., 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 14, 15, 17, 104, 141, 142, 189, 201, 212, 215, 217, 221, 222; aggression theory of, 8, 49, 53–62, 102, 147, 159–160, 208, 260, 262; and amateurs, 9, 19, 31–32, 44–47; as co-­founder of ethology, 3–4, 20–32, 87; correspondence of with Anthony Storr, 73; correspondence of with Philip Wylie, 163–164; criticism of, 11–12, 37–42, 143, 147–156, 160–161, 163–164, 169–174, 175–176, 178–183, 188–194, 212–213, 230; on domestication, 32–37, 40–41, 61, 162, 176; early life of, 20; education of, 20–21; image in media of, 18, 42–­43, 44, 45, 53, 170, 204; instinct theory of, 23–30, 52–54, 147, 187–188, 260; and Nazism, 33, 36, 37, 40–41, 155–156, 175–176, 178–180, 183, 228; Nobel Prize of, 42, 174–176, 245, 265; as science pop­u­lar­izer, 5, 18–19, 54, 56, 57–62, 74, 93, 142, 150, 162, 189, 204, 261; and sociobiology, 188–192, 208–­210, 226–227, 228, 229; as storyteller, 9, 17–19, 30–31, 49–50, 54, 56–62. See also Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins; ethology; King Solomon’s Ring; On Aggression; pop ethology Lorenz, Margarethe (Gebhardt), 20–21 Lorenz Hall (Altenberg), 18, 20 love: and aggression, 8, 49, 59, 61–62, 99–100; in ethological method, 9, 31–32; as innate drive, 107–108, 116–117, 119–121, 123, 131, 141, 144, 183; and mutual aid, 111; as object of scientific study, 108, 126–130, 137, 139; types of, 127. See also amitology Lowe, Marian, 250, 253–254 Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, 124 Luckmann, Thomas, 239 Lysenko, Trofim, 100 354

Magic Animal, The (Wylie), 162–163, 164 Makapan, 84 Malcolm X, 145 “Male Dominance? Yes, Alas. A Sexist Plot? No” (Tiger), 168 Man, 117 Man and Aggression (Montagu), 143, 182; contributors to, 149–151, 169–174; first edition of, 143, 149–151, 160; reviews of, 154–155; second edition of, 143, 169–174, 175 Man and Beast (symposium), 188, 189–193, 194, 198, 200 Man Meets Dog (Lorenz), 18, 36 Man’s Most Dangerous Myth (Montagu), 115, 128 “Man’s Social Appetite” (Montagu), 119 Man the Hunter (symposium), 101–103 Marais, Eugene, 87, 94 Marxism, 13, 101, 122, 174, 220, 223, 264 Maslow, Abraham, 138–139, 260–261 Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology, 139 Maudsley Hospital, 63 Mau Mau uprising, 82 Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology (Seewiesen), 36 Mayr, Ernst, 201 McCarthy, Joseph, 80–81 McCarthyism, 88, 101 McDougall, William, 20, 28, 29 Mead, Margaret, 147, 150, 158, 175 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 179 Men in Groups (Tiger), 166, 167 Menninger, Karl, 8, 158 Menninger, Walter, 158 Midgely, Mary, 255 Milam, Erika Lorraine, 271n10 militant enthusiasm, 61–62 Miller, Neal, 8 Millett, Kate, 168, 257 Modern Prob­lems in Religion (Akhilananda), 139

INDEX

modern synthesis. See evolutionary synthesis Momism, 161 Money, John, 243, 252 Montagu, Ashley, 10–11, 12, 14, 15, 101, 106–108, 125, 127, 128, 189, 193, 227, 267; on cooperation as biological drive, 115–116, 119–121, 140–141, 142, 181–183, 184, 260; as critic of pop ethologists, 148–149, 151–157, 163, 169–174, 175–176, 180–185, 259, 264; as critic of sociobiology, 255, 265; criticism of, 143, 146, 162–163, 189; and cultural relativism, 109–110, 115–116, 146, 181; early life and education of, 108–109; and feminism, 169, 230; at Harvard, 118, 122, 129–130; and Jewish identity, 109; on love as biological drive, 116, 119–121, 127, 140–141, 142, 260; as pop­ul­ ar­izer, 119, 130, 134–­135, 136–137, 204, 260–261; on race, 10, 106–110, 115–117, 183; at Rutgers, 118–119, 136–137, 166; as TV personality, 134–­135; on ­women, 10, 130–135, 244, 262 Moreno, Jacob L., 309n147 Morgan, Elaine, 167, 211, 245 Morris, Desmond, 5, 70, 156–157, 189, 211, 217, 226; criticism of, 168–169, 170, 211, 231 mother-­child bond, 51–53, 119, 131, 134 ­mother love, 53, 127, 140–141 Ms., 256 Murray, Henry, 126 mutual aid, 10–11, 110–111, 112, 116, 122, 128, 181 Mutual Aid (Kropotkin), 110–111 mutually assured destruction, 67 Naked Ape, The (Morris), 5, 156–157, 168 nation, 100, 125, 153, 294n87. See also territory Nation, The, 149 National Commission on the ­Causes and Prevention of Vio­lence, 157–158 National Review, 147 Natu­ral History, 149

Natu­ral History of Aggression, The (symposium), 67 naturalistic fallacy, 112, 205 natu­ral se­lection, 114, 205. See also Darwinism Natu­ral Superiority of W ­ omen, The (Montagu), 130–134, 132, 262 Nature, 149 nature, as guide to morality, 8, 10–12, 32–35, 100–101, 109–121, 127, 133, 139–141, 159, 188–189, 193, 205, 212, 214–215, 218–222, 229 nature / nurture dichotomy, 13, 14–15, 16, 144, 172, 174, 181, 184, 230, 259, 262–263, 266 Nature of H ­ uman Aggression, The (Montagu), 180–183 “Nature of War and the Myth of Nature” (Montagu), 110 Nazi Party, 7, 33, 36, 37, 40–41, 173–176, 236 Nazism, 106, 111–114, 117, 133, 145, 155–156, 162, 173–176, 178–180. See also Nazi Party Neo-­Darwinism, 205–206. See also evolutionary synthesis New Republic, 145 New Yorker, 145, 146, 156 New York Review of Books, 149, 223, 227 New York Times, 145, 147, 149, 156, 168, 202–205, 227, 230, 266–267 New York University Dental School, 109 Nice, Margaret Morse, 21, 46 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 97 Nixon, Richard M., 79, 237 Nobel Prize, 4, 42, 174, 183, 245, 265 nonviolence, 123 Northeastern University, 251 Not in Our Genes (Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin), 265 noyau, 294n87 Oakley, Kenneth, 89, 94 objectivity: criticism of, 152, 231, 239–240, 242–243, 250–251, 254, 259, 261; in ethology, 30–32; in psychotherapy, 63, 65; in sociobiology, 188, 263 355

INDEX

object-­relations, 11, 50, 53, 64, 66 Observer, The (London), 146 Odets, Clifford, 78 O’Donnell, Doris, 231 Office of Naval Research, 118 Olduvai Gorge, 82 On Aggression (Lorenz), 4, 31, 37, 49–50, 66, 67, 68, 180; summary of, 57–62; criticism of, 67–68, 69–70, 149–157, 174–175, 179; publication of, 142, 189, 262; reviews of, 145–148 On Being ­Human (Montagu), 119–120 On ­Human Nature (Wilson), 188, 215, 218–220, 224 Osgood, Charles, 103–104 osteodontokeratic culture, 93 Oxford University, 156 paleoanthropology, 46, 75–77, 87, 96–97, 100, 171 Parsons, Talcott, 126 “Part and Parcel in Animal and H ­ uman Socie­ties” (Lorenz), 36, 56–57 Patten, William, 110 Pavlov, Ivan, 39, 163 peace biologists, 110–117, 127 Pearl Harbor, 100 pecking order, 87, 114, 162, 171, 195 Peckinpah, Sam, 180 Pent­house, 158 ­People, 203 Petrograd Prison, 123 Pilbeam, David, 171 Piltdown hoax, 82 Pinker, Steven, 2, 3, 15, 269n4, 270n6, 295n94 Playboy, 172 plea­sure princi­ple, 51 Pleistocene, 82, 84, 91, 192–193, 205 pop ethology, 5–7, 9–10, 12–16, 18–19, 36–37, 46, 70, 104, 159–160, 162, 188–189, 203–204, 219–222, 226–227, 258–262; criticisms of, by feminists, 166–169, 230–231, 240–241, 246–247, 249–250, 262; criticisms of, by 356

Montagu, 148–149, 151–157, 163, 169–176, 180–185, 259–262; criticisms of, by Wilson, 185, 189–197, 201, 205, 208–­210, 211–213, 215–218; definition of, 5; major works of (see African Genesis; ­Human Aggression; Imperial Animal; Naked Ape; On Aggres­ sion; Territorial Imperative;); prac­ti­tion­ers of, 5, 70, 76. See also Ardrey; Fox; Lorenz; Morris; Storr; Tiger popu­lar science, 2–4, 6–7, 11–13, 18, 20, 76–77, 96, 137, 216, 225, 260–267 population biology, 197, 198, 201, 205–207, 209 Poznan (Poland), 34 Pravda, 123 “Predatory Implemental Technique of Australopithecus, The” (Dart), 83 “Predatory Transition from Ape to Man, The” (Dart), 83 Pressman, Sonia, 134 primatology, 171, 184, 248, 251 Prince­ton (New Jersey), 118, 120, 121 Prince­ton University, 137 Pryor, Karen Wylie, 317n87 psychiatry, 63, 69, 70, 102 psychoanalysis, 8, 11, 50–53, 58, 63–66, 69–70, 121, 161 psy­chol­ogy. See behaviorism; humanistic psy­chol­ogy; psychiatry; psychoanalysis; psychotherapy “Psy­chol­ogy and Phylogeny” (Lorenz), 36 “Psy­chol­ogy Constructs the Female” (Weisstein), 166–168 Psycho-­Neurological Institute (St. Petersburg, Rus­sia), 122 psychotherapy, 62–66, 70, 138 Quarterly Review of Biology, 39 race, 10, 106–107, 109, 116–117, 119 racism, 144, 155–156, 162, 169, 173–174, 178–180, 182–183, 264; Montagu as critic

INDEX

of, 10, 108–110, 115–117, 120, 182–183; in sociobiology, 14, 223–234, 240, 249–251, 257 Radcliffe College, 127, 236, 237, 241 Ramakrishna Order of Hinduism, 138 rape, 2, 158, 258 reciprocal altruism, 198, 214. See also altruism: in sociobiology Reconstruction of Humanity, The (Sorokin), 138 Redbook, 147, 150 Redfield, Robert, 78 Reed, Evelyn, 168–169, 245, 246 reflex, 23, 39, 174, 177 relativism. See cultural relativism releaser, 23, 52, 54 Rensberger, Boyce, 203, 230 Reporter, The, 82, 84 Research Center in Altruistic Integration and Creativity. See Harvard Research Center in Altruistic Integration and Creativity Research Society for Creative Altruism, 137–140; membership of, 308n147; speakers at meeting of, 310n160. See also Sorokin Ribble, Margaret, 119 Ripley, S. Dillon, 189 Ritter, William, 110 ritualization: in animal be­hav­ior, 20, 49, 54, 57–59, 67–69, 71, 147, 159, 162, 173, 187, 208, 262; criticism of, 191–192; in ­human be­hav­ior, 69, 72, 172–173, 219 Robinson, John, 90 Romanov, Nicholas (Czar), 122 Rose, Steven, 265 Rosenthal, Arthur J., 202–203 Rosoff, Betty, 245–247, 250 Rossi, Alice, 253, 254 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 196, 267 Rowell, Thelma, 251 Runwell Hospital, 63 Rus­sian orthodoxy, 123

Rus­sian Provisional Government, 123 Rus­sian Revolution, 122–125 Rutgers University, 118, 122, 136–137, 166 Sahlins, Marshall, 149–151 Salzman, Freda, 252–253, 255 Saturday Review, 131, 133, 145, 146 satyagraha, 127 Schneider, David, 103 Schneirla, T. C., 39, 149, 150, 153–154, 164–165, 173, 181 Schottengymnasium (Vienna), 20 Science, 115 Science for the ­People (group), 223, 229, 230–233, 235, 246 Science for the P ­ eople (magazine), 224, 231–232, 245, 252, 255 science-­humanities relationship, 95–96, 211–212, 220 Scientific American, 149, 205, 227 Scientific Monthly, 115 Scott, John Paul, 148, 149, 154 Screen Writers Guild, 79 Screen Writers Guild Inc. v. Motion Picture Association of Amer­i­ca, 80 Second Sex, The (de Beauvoir), 133 second wave feminism. See feminism Seewiesen, 36 Seitz, Alfred, 30 self-­actualization, 138 Sermon on the Mount, 126 Sevareid, Eric, 98, 105 Seville Statement on Vio­lence, 265 sexism: in pop ethology, 168–169, 230–231, 241–242; in science, 239–245, 251–251, 254; in Science for the ­People, 232–233, 235; in sociobiology, 14, 217, 225, 230, 231–235, 238, 240–241, 247–248, 255, 257, 259, 264; in Sociobiology Study Group, 233–235, 258–259 Shadow of Heroes (Ardrey), 89, 95 Sherrington, Charles S., 39 357

INDEX

Shields, Stephanie, 232 Shockley, William, 183, 227, 229, 231, 234, 321n147 “Short Po­liti­cal Aberration of Konrad Lorenz, The,” 178 Shrader, James Houston, 139, 140 Sikorsky, Igor I., 137, 308n145 Sing Me No Lullaby (Ardrey), 81 Skinner, B. F., 150, 176, 187, 229 “(Slight) Archaic Case of Murder, A” (Ardrey), 83, 84 Smithsonian Institution, 188, 189, 198 Snow, C. P., 63, 95–96 Social Construction of Real­ity, The (Berger and Luckmann), 239 social constructivism, 225, 239–240, 250–251, 254, 259 social contract, 7 Social Contract, The (Ardrey), 194–196 social Darwinism, 111, 120, 179, 230; as epithet applied to pop ethology, 144, 152, 155, 170, 173–174, 182, 230–231; as epithet applied to sociobiology, 226–227, 230–231 “Social Instincts” (Montagu), 119 socialism, 100–101, 123, 234 Social Revolutionary Party (Rus­sia), 122 sociobiology, 1, 2, 3, 6, 15, 16, 185; debate about, 13–15, 16, 215, 217–218, 222–230, 231–248, 250, 255, 257–259, 264–265; definition of, 13, 188–189, 200–201, 204–205, 206–207; and ethology, 208–­210, 211–215, 217, 218–222, 226–227, 263 Sociobiology (Wilson), 13, 16, 185, 188, 197–198, 201, 202–203; criticism of, 13–14, 222–230, 231–234, 238–245, 247–248, 250, 257–259; illustrations in, 202–­203; publication of, 202–203, 204, 205, 215, 226, 232, 245; reviews of, 226–227; summary of, 205–215, 218. See also sociobiology Sociobiology Debate, The (Caplan), 255 Sociobiology: ­Doing What Comes Naturally (film), 231 358

“Socio-­biology of Man” (Montagu), 109 Sociobiology Study Group (SSG), 13, 15, 223–225, 228–233, 235, 240, 245, 254–255, 263; criticism of, 233–235, 258–259 Sorokin, Elena, 123, 124 Sorokin, Pitirim, 11, 107–108, 130–­131, 141, 260–261; amitology of, 11, 125–130, 139–140; as critic of communism, 124; as critic of relativism, 124–125; as critic of sociology, 129–130; early life of, 122; education of, 122–123; at Harvard University, 11, 124, 126–130; po­liti­cal activity of, 122–123; and Research Society for Creative Altruism, 137–141 South Africa, 82, 100 Soviet Union, 9, 12, 100, 125, 145, 177 Spencer, Herbert, 227, 230 Spitz, René, 127 Sputnik, 139 Stalin, Joseph, 100 standard social science model, 15 Stanford University, 102 Starr, Susan Leigh, 243 Statement on Race (UNESCO), 106–107, 116–117, 118, 119, 131, 141 State University of New York (Buffalo), 243 Stern College, 245 Stevenson, Adlai, 80, 97 Stewart, Omer, 149 Storr, Anthony, 5, 50–51, 100, 157, 169, 172, 189; early life of, 62; education of, 62–63; and ethology, 67–74, 77, 157, 169, 260, 262; as psychotherapist, 62–66, 70 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 242 submission gestures, 54, 56–57, 59, 67, 103. See also ritualization superorganism concept, 198 survival of the fittest. See social Darwinism Swami Akhilananda. See Akhilananda, Swami System of Sociology (Sorokin), 123

INDEX

tabula ra­sa. See blank slate Taungs (South Africa), 75, 82, 149 Tavistock Clinic, 51 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 7 Territorial Imperative, The (Ardrey), 4, 11, 98–101, 143, 178, 180, 189, 219; illustrations in, 92; publication of, 142, 262; reviews of, 145–148 territory: criticism of as innate drive, 141, 149, 153–154, 219, 233; innate drive for, 72, 87–88, 94, 98–101, 145, 158, 162, 164, 195, 198, 219. See also aggression Third Pan African Congress on Prehistory (Northern Rhodesia), 84 Thornhill, Randy, 258 Thunder Rock (Ardrey), 78–79 Tiger, Lionel, 137, 166, 167, 169, 228, 229, 257; criticism of, 167–169, 211, 231, 257 Time, 147 Tinbergen, Niko, 18, 21, 28, 148, 156, 174, 178, 186, 187, 226 Tobach, Ethel, 14, 245, 246–250, 255, 265 Tolman, Edward C., 20 Tolstoy, Leo, 123 totalitarianism, 10, 113, 133, 142, 152, 178, 261 Touching (Montagu), 140 Trilling, Lionel, 220 triumph ceremony. See greylag geese Trivers, Robert, 198, 231 Trotsky, Leon, 123 Turnbull, Colin, 103 two cultures divide. See science-­humanities relationship 2001: A Space Odyssey, 5, 104, 180 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organ­ization), 106–107, 112, 114, 116–117, 118, 119, 120 Unfriendly Ten, 79–80 United Nations, 72 University College, London, 109 University of Chicago, 78, 96, 101, 112

University of Minnesota, 124 University of St. Petersburg (Rus­sia), 122 University of the Witswatersrand (Johannesburg), 75 University of Vienna, 20–21 University of Wisconsin-­Madison, 251 Up the Ivy (Montagu), 136 Ute Indians, 149 vacuum activities, 27, 28, 31 Vedanta, 138 Vietnam War, 92, 100, 145, 155, 237 vio­lence, 141, 145, 157–160, 172, 181, 183–184, 193, 265–267. See also aggression; competition; territory; war vitalism, 38 Von Bertalanffy, Ludwig Von Frisch, Karl, 174, 201 Von Holst, Erich, 21, 27 Von Romberg, Baron Gisbert, 36 Waddington, Conrad H., 112, 226 Waiting for Lefty (Odets), 78 Wald, George, 236–237 Waldorf Statement, 79–80 war, 147, 159–160; as ele­ment of ­human prehistory, 102–103, 109–110, 121, 153, 184, 214, 266–267; need for substitute for, 7, 69, 72, 172 War / Peace Report, 149 Washburn, Sherwood, 84, 95, 102–103, 184 Watson, John Broadus., 20, 182 Watts riot, 145 Weisstein, Naomi, 166–168, 253, 240, 243–244, 246, 256 Wenner-­Gren Foundation, 101 Wertham, Fredric, 150, 175 Westminster Abbey, 62–63 Westminster Hospital, 63 West Side Story, 92, 95, 166 Wheeler, William M, 187 Whitman, Charles Otis, 32 359

INDEX

Wiesenthal, Simon, 175 Wilder, Thornton, 78 Wilkie, Leighton, 84 Wilson, Edward O., 2, 3, 13–14, 16, 185, 237, 243, 255, 258; on aggression and competition, 189–192, 198; on altruism, 198, 200, 207–208, 214; criticism of, 194–197, 224, 226–230, 232, 248, 249, 258–259, 263–264; early life of, 186; education of, 186–187; and feminism, 255, 257, 259, 264; on group se­lection, 195, 198, 199–200, 207–208; image in media of, 204–205, 220–222, 227; as science pop­u­lar­izer, 185, 202–204, 205, 212, 215–217, 220–222, 263; and Sociobiology, 202–213, 243. See also Insect Socie­ties; On ­Human Nature; sociobiology; Sociobiology (Wilson)

360

Winchester College, 63 ­Woman that Never Evolved, The (Hrdy), 255–257 ­Women Look at Biology Looking at ­Women (Hubbard, Henifin, and Fried), 240–245 World Health Organ­ization (WHO), 51–52, 73 World War I, 7, 110, 112 World War II, 47, 51, 53–54, 80, 111, 156, 175, 261 Wrangham, Richard, 266 Wylie, Philip, 160–164, 165, 176–177, 179, 228; correspondence with Lorenz, 163–164 Wynne-­Edwards, V. C. (Vero Copner), 195–196, 198, 207 Zuckerman, Solly, 93, 94, 95, 149